"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Jammin' The Vote With Dave Matthews, Wilco, Phish and Bob Weir
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PDA is going to be registering people to vote and talking with them about progressive solutions to American challenges at Crosby Stills and Nash concerts across America starting next month. And they'll be talking about progressive candidates who can make a difference, like David Gill in Illinois and Norman Solomon in California. Blue America will be working with them on a project that will put a rare and beautiful numbered, signed Neil Young art print into the hands of one lucky winner. You'll be hearing more about that very soon. But there's another organization working the rock'n'roll circuit, particularly the jam band circuit to register voters and that's Headcount. Like PDA, Headcount is a grassroots organization; unlike PDA, Headcount is a non-partisan group. It's primary function is to use the power of music to register voters and raise social consciousness. Since 2004, HeadCount has staged voter registration drives at over 2,000 concerts and signed up over 175,000 voters. With questions looming about young voter turnout in this election cycle-- between disappointment with promises from 2008 and GOP efforts to disenfranchise young voters, some major rock bands are hosting voter registration drives at all their summer concerts.
Headcount's “Great American Road Trip,” is a cross-country trek taken by young volunteers who are following the Dave Matthews Band, Wilco, Phish and Furthur (Grateful Dead) across the country, just to register voters at each stop on each tour. Because, as our friends at Headcount like to ask, "what's more American than rock'n'roll?
They expect to register voters at 103 concerts and cover 15,000 miles. Each band has been assigned a crack Headcount team of 2 to 4 volunteers who will be augmented in each city by another 10 local volunteers. Anyone 18 years of age or older can sign up to volunteer at HeadCount.org.
The HeadCount team is traveling to each Dave Matthews Band show in a Volkswagen Routan minivan-- and filing dispatches from the road on the HeadCount blog. Volkswagen of America, Inc. and Dave Matthews Band’s Bama Works Fund are covering all the volunteers’ travel costs.
HeadCount set an all-time record for a single concert tour when they registered 12,161 voters with Dave Matthews Band in 2004. That year, turnout by voters age 18 to 24 jumped 11 percent. It was by far the largest increase among any age group. In 2008 that trend continued, with young voters being the only age group to show an increase in turnout.
However, it will take some work if that trend is to continue. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that only 43 percent of young voters said they were very interested in the Presidential election, compared to 65 percent in a poll taken at the same time of year in 2008. Another poll by Gallup said that only 56 percent of registered voters under the age of 30 plan to cast their ballot in November.
One of the best ways to increase voter turnout is by welcoming new voters into the democratic process. In 2008, over 72 percent of the voters registered by HeadCount turned out to vote, according to an independent study by the Washington, D.C.-based New Organizing Institute. That same study said that over 4 million votes were cast that year by individuals who registered to vote through independent groups like HeadCount.
Why is NYC Fleet Week 2012 different from all previous ones? (Hint: Just ask a gay, lesbian, or bi sailor)
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Crowds watched yesterday as ships sailed into the harbor for New York's first Fleet Week since the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." (photo: DNAinfo/Paul Lomax)
"I mean, we always tried to bag a sailor, but this time they're allowed to want it back. . . . I just want to reward our troops, if you know what I mean."
-- Chelsea resident Jonathan Francis O'Donnell
by Ken
Fleet Week has always been a fun time hereabouts, what with all those ships in the harbor and all those sailors on shore. It hadn't occurred to me, though, until I saw this DNAinfo piece, that for a lot of sailors this Fleet Week is very different from Fleet Weeks past. This week, for the first time, gay, lesbian, and bi sailors can enjoy their time on shore the same way their straight colleagues have always been able to, without looking over their shoulders or worrying who might see-and-snitch. (If I'm understanding this correctly, trans folk are still excluded from this party.)
Primitive-brained homophobes like to make believe that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks are making outrageous demands for some kind of "special privileges." This is, I assume, because the primitive-brained homophobes are too stupid or dishonest to grasp that LGBT folk just want the same rights that everyone else has, including primitive-brained homophobes. If some of the enjoyment they seek ashore should happen to partake of a sexual nature, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that military personnel have ever been endowed with an expectation of chastity.
From time immemorial any port that hosts naval personnel has had a small industry devoted to extending, shall we say, hospitality to those naval personnel -- just as the needs and wishes of military personnel are serviced wherever they're stationed around the world. It's a privilege, though, that has been fraught with peril for military personnel of disapproved sexual orientations.
I admit that this story may have hit me with particular force because it speaks to an old fantasy: providing, er, hospitality to some of those hunky sailor fellows unloosed on the Big Apple. Of course I never had any idea how one mighty actually go about doing it. Now I'm hoping all those young men and women on those ships have themselves one hell of a time.
Active LGBT Servicemembers march in the San Diego Pride Parade in July. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has thrilled gay military members for Fleet Week. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
HELL'S KITCHEN -- For the first Fleet Week since Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed, New York's gay nightlife scene is encouraging men and women in uniform to come out.
Bars and hotels have set up Fleet Week-themed specials and planned a host of parties to attract gay servicemembers for their first open Fleet Week in the celebration's 25-year history.
Zeke Stokes, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which represents LGBT troops, said that at previous Fleet Weeks, military attendees at such events would often risk getting discharged.
"If they chose to go, they were always looking over their shoulders, just like they were all the time," he said. "This is a new day for servicemembers because they're now free to serve openly without fear of being fired."
The city's gay venues have taken notice of the sudden influx of soldiers.
The OUT NYC, the city's first gay hotel has kicked off their Served With Pride Package for Fleet Week, but will keep the discount program going indefinitely. Military personnel staying at the hotel at at 512 W. 42nd St. will get 30 percent off their rooms, a complimentary "Served With Pride" T-shirt or tank top, along with free wifi and complimentary continental breakfast.
Inside the hotel, the XL Nightclub will transform into the "USS Rockit" Friday, during a porn-star-hosted Fleet Week party featuring a free-flowing vodka open bar from 10 to 11 p.m., along with "hot sailors and surprise acts."
The party, hosted by porn star Pierre Fitch, has a $10 cover.
The Maritime Hotel at 363 West 16th Street is offering its own discounts to sailors, with rooms for $99 a night for any active-duty seaman or woman in their Navy whites.
The hotel's restaurant, La Bottega, has put together its own line of nautical-themed specialty cocktails, including the Anchor, the Albatross, and the Do Ask, Please Tell.
Sue Fulton, a spokeswoman for Outserve, said that many of her organization's more than 5,500 actively-serving LGBT military members were excited to participate in the events.
"People are getting leave so they can get together with friends," said Fulton, a former Army Captain.
"There's a level of celebration in Fleet Week -- there's always been -- and now LGBT servicemembers can really be a part of that, part of the military family."
The newly-open Fleet Week also has the city's non-military LGBT community abuzz.
"I mean, we always tried to bag a sailor, but this time they're allowed to want it back," said Jonathan Francis O'Donnell, a 32-year-old Chelsea resident who said he plans to attend as many LGBT Fleet Week events as possible.
"I just want to reward our troops, if you know what I mean."
OMG! Congressman Mike Coffman Has Been Turned Into A Zombie
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You'll recall that a few weeks ago, Mike Coffman, the right-wing extremist in a neck-and-neck congressional battle outside Denver with Blue America-endorsed Joe Miklosi, had too much to drink at a campaign fundraising event and went publicly insane. He told a stunned audience of Republicans at the Elbert County Fairgrounds-- unprompted-- what he thinks of this country's elected President: “I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”
Coffman's been in hiding since then, not from the Secret Service or from Democrats, but from the media. Well, Tuesday he finally broke the silence... but I bet he wishes he hadn't taken so many of his wife's painkillers before he did. And God only knows how much Jägermeister he downed to help him to work up the courage to answer a couple of questions from Channel 9 and face the music. Forthcoming he wasn't. Doesn't the NRCC help their most endangered candidates with damage control experts? Coffman sure is in desperate need of a team. All he could muster was a lame one-line talking point to repeated questions. He sounds like a zombie... I mean even more than usual.
9NEWS Reporter Kyle Clark approached Coffman outside a closed door fundraiser Tuesday night after the Coffman campaign ignored several requests over several days to schedule an interview with the congressman.
Coffman reiterated that he misspoke and apologized, but would not elaborate. Coffman offered the same one-line explanation to every question asked, including when he was asked if he would answer any question with a different response.
Coffman had steadfastly refused to speak on camera regarding his May 12th comment at a fundraiser in Elbert County. The comments, recorded and posted online by a Coffman supporter, were first aired by 9NEWS.
...The House of Representatives is on a recess and Coffman has been lying low. On Saturday, he did not show up as expected to an event in Aurora, instead sending an aide who read a statement saying the congressman was sick. Constituents calling Coffman's district office have been told he has no public meetings or appearances during the recess.
The low-profile is a departure for the typically-accessible Coffman, who has appeared on 9NEWS (often at his request) sixteen times over the last twelve months, discussing topics as varied as payroll taxes, wildfire mitigation and the importance of Memorial Day.
When 9NEWS was unable to schedule an interview with Coffman, Reporter Kyle Clark approached him in public.
Their conversation, in its entirety, was as follows:
KYLE CLARK: Congressman Coffman, how are you?
REP. COFFMAN: How are you doing? Good to see you.
KYLE CLARK: Good to see you. You're a tough man to find lately.
REP. COFFMAN: I am.
KYLE CLARK: Can we chat quickly before you go inside?
REP. COFFMAN: Sure.
KYLE CLARK: Alright, fantastic. Why don't we head right over here so we're out of the way. Thank you for your time. I apologize for showing up unannounced. I've been trying to call your staff. They won't return my phone calls. Let me ask you, after your comments about the President, do you feel voters are owed a better explanation than just, I misspoke?
REP. COFFMAN: I think that... Umm... I stand by my statement that I misspoke and I apologize.
KYLE CLARK: OK. And who were you apologizing to?
REP. COFFMAN: You know, I stand by my statement that I misspoke and I apologize.
KYLE CLARK: I apologize, we talk to you all the time, you're a very forthcoming guy. Who's telling you not to talk and to handle it like this?
REP. COFFMAN: I stand by my statement, that I wrote, that you have, and I misspoke and I apologize.
KYLE CLARK: Was it that you thought it would go over well in Elbert County where folks are very conservative and you'd never say something like that in the suburbs?
REP. COFFMAN: I stand by my statement that I misspoke and I apologize.
KYLE CLARK: Is there anything I can ask you that you'll answer differently?
REP. COFFMAN: You know, I stand by my statement that I misspoke and I apologize.
KYLE CLARK: Thank you, congressman.
REP. COFFMAN: Thank you.
9NEWS Political Analyst Floyd Ciruli says Coffman is trapped between apologizing further and antagonizing his conservative base, or digging in and alienating the unaffiliated voters who now make up a third of his newly-competitive redrawn district.
"Clearly he was given the advice by his top funders and best advisors to say nothing," Ciruli said. "The strategy of silence is extremely difficult to pull off."
"It looks like you're hiding," Ciruli said. "It looks defensive. It makes you look vulnerable."
Just how vulnerable Coffman is remains to be seen. He holds a substantial fundraising edge over his Democratic opponent, State Representative Joe Miklosi.
Oh, good idea. You can help Joe Miklosi, a dedicated and independent-minded progressive, beat the zombies (see below) here at the Blue America ActBlue page.
Why Did Obama Ever Get Involved With A Deranged, Senile Freak Like Alan Simpson?
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"Klaatu barada nikto"
Simpson is only 81 but his brain no longer serves him. More often than not his blurts out the craziest things. But since he doesn't have to run for office again, it barely seems to matter. I guess it wouldn't... if he weren't involved with public policy. But for some reason I still can't fathom, Obama put him in charge-- along with Democratic corporate whore Erskine Bowles-- of a commission that supposed to work up some kind of a Grand Bargain to screw the American people out of Social Security and Medicare. Earlier this spring the California Alliance for Retired Americans protested outside a Simpson Bowles event and below is the letter they got back April 6 (though it was dated April 7). Tell me, does this sound sane to you? But, for that matter, does screwing up Social Security sound sane... and that's just what our political elites thing is the serious thing that adults (themselves) must do.
Erskine Bowles and I thoroughly enjoyed our time on the West Coast and received an excellent reception from folks -- at least those who are using their heads and have given up using emotion, fear, guilt or racism to juice up their troops. Your little flyer entitled “Bowles! Simpson! Stop using the deficit as a phony excuse to gut our Social Security!” is one of the phoniest excuses for a “flyer” I have ever seen. You use the faces of young people, who are the ones who are going to get gutted while you continue to push out your blather and drivel. My suggestion to you-- an honest one-- read the damn report. The Moment of Truth-- 67 pages, and then tell me if we’re not doing the right thing with Social Security. What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very people that we are trying to save, while the “greedy geezers” like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap. You must feel some sense of shame for shoveling out this bulls**t. Read the latest news from the Social Security Trustees. The Social Security System will not “hit the skids” in 2033 instead of 2036. If you can’t understand all of this you need a pane of glass in your naval so you can see out during the day! Read the report. Get back to me. My address is below.
If you don’t read the report, — as Ebenezer Scrooge said in the Christmas Carol, “Haunt me no longer!”
Best regards,
Alan Simpson
Nan Basmer, president of California Alliance for Retired Americans responded: "Alan Simpson’s mean-spirited comments insult the intelligence and dedication of retiree activists who worry about their children and grandchildren’s future. Sen. Simpson sounds an awful lot like Mitt Romney and others who will use the recent Social Security Trustees report as political cover for their radical changes. They would put seniors at risk while enriching Wall Street and the big health insurance companies. For instance, increasing the retirement age-- one of their suggestions-- would be extremely unfair to workers, particularly those in blue-collar and service sector jobs. And privatizing Social Security would let Wall Street firms profit while gambling workers’ Social Security savings on the roulette wheel of the stock market."
Raising the payroll tax cap seems to make the most sense, right? Sure unless you're a multimillionaire. We need to be more careful about electing too many millionaires to Congress... even if they're Democrats.
Why I Would Have Voted For John Wolfe In The Arkansas Democratic Primary
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In 2008 Tennessee attorney John Wolfe voted for Obama. I did too. But that isn't all we have in common. He's dissatisfied with Obama's first term-- but he doesn't want to go backwards into the Republican nightmare that is at the root of all the country's problems. His beef with Obama is that he campaigned as a populist and them governed as a corporatist. “What he did," says Wolfe, "was he brought in people who caused the crisis and made them his closest advisers: Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, Jack Lew. He basically institutionalized failure... He has such eloquence, intelligence, charisma, we can only emulate that. I would never even approach it, but he should have used that to rally people around an idea and push for something more. Instead, he just played it safe."
Previously Wolfe, who's running a "word-of-mouth campaign," won 3 parishes in the Louisiana primary. Tuesday "Uncommitted," the only alternative to Obama, won 41.2% in the Kentucky Democratic primary. And in Arkansas Wolfe managed to get 67,491 votes (42%) to Obama's 94,852 (58%). Wolfe did better than Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich combined (just over 47,000 votes).
Wolfe wasn't attacking Obama from the right-- the way corporate whores like Cory Booker, Lanny Davis, Harold Ford and Ed Rendell have. He's going after the corporatist gestalt that has more and more made the Democratic and Republican parties almost indistinguishable on everything but divisive social issues. The Weekly Standard isn't someplace to go for news but it's worth taking a look at their celebration of Wolfe and the hope that he would embarrass the president.
Some have dismissed Obama’s troubles in red states like Arkansas and West Virginia as inconsequential, but the previous Democratic president, Arkansas native Bill Clinton, won both states twice. Both states currently have Democratic governors, and Democrats have won several elections in these states in recent years. Wolfe says his underdog candidacy is the manifestation of a large number of Democrats’ frustration with Obama.
“Now the people have a choice,” Wolfe says. “I think that the people think Obama isn’t listening to them.” He cites the doubletalk by Obama and national Democrats regarding private equity and Wall Street bankers.
“He criticizes Wall Street during the day, and at night he goes into these luxurious soirees with the bankers,” Wolfe says. “He leaves those meetings with millions.”
Wolfe argues that if the government can get health care costs under control and institute stricter banking regulations, many of the country’s remaining fiscal and economic problems can solve themselves. He says he supports restoring the Glass-Steagall banking act of 1933 and opening up the credit default markets, as well as a single-payer health care system that he says would alleviate the costs by getting rid of the expensive, high-risk pools.
Next week Wolfe will be on the primary ballot in Texas. I wish he was running in California as well... in November.
How Republican Party Hyper Partisanship Is Destroying The Judiciary
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KKK fanatic Jeff Sessions was rejected by the Senate for a judgeship... so now he votes against all Obama's nominees
The Senate voted Monday, just once-- but it was an important vote. Most Republicans have been dedicated to obstructing the confirmation of President Obama's judicial nominees. It's the worst instance in American history and it has a lot to do with the blatant racism of today's GOP. They-- particularly unreconstructed Confederates like Vitter (LA), DeMint (SC), Sessions (AL), Isakson (GA), Boozman (AR), Shelby (AL), Coburn (OK), Burr (NC), Cornyn (TX), and Wicker (MS), Chambliss (GA) and Inhofe (OK)-- have never accepted the legitimacy of Obama's election and have obstructed virtually every single judicial nomination he has made, even when-- as he often does-- he nominates pretty conservative characters. Paul Watford was confirmed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by a 61-34 bipartisan vote on Monday, 9 Republicans having crossed the aisle and joining every Democrat, after Miss McConnell gave up on the usual filibuster nonsense.
And Watford, an African-American attorney from Los Angeles who was nominated 7 months ago, October 18, 2011, isn't some conservative shill. His nomination was widely praised, including by conservatives. One of the "problems" that bugged partisan Republicans in the Senate is that Watford, a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is, at 44, young and vigorous and will have a long, long career ahead of him. That's what cooked Gordon Liu's goose and why he's not on the federal Court now. (He's on the California Supreme Court.) Republicans don't want young judges unless they're young radical right judges, fearing that they could be part of a bench for the Supreme Court.
Last December, when these same Republicans filibustered (to death) Obama's highly-praised nomination of Caitlin Halligan, an OpEd in the NY Times by Linda Greenhouse pointed out the Republican Party's perfidy and, in effect, plot against effective governance.
This was not a fight over ideology. It was an effort to keep the president from filling a seat on what is not just another appeals court. The D.C. Circuit is not just a federal court but a national one, with jurisdiction over federal regulatory initiatives and habeas corpus appeals by Guantánamo detainees. Next month, it will hear a potential landmark case on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. Its caseload may not be huge, but its cases tend to be dense, tough and vitally important.
When pressed on their treatment of Ms. Halligan, Republicans typically invoke President George W. Bush’s two nominees whom the Democrats blocked from the D. C. Circuit, Peter D. Keisler and Miguel A. Estrada, both highly qualified and both prominent conservatives. (The classy Mr. Estrada wrote to the Judiciary Committee in support of Ms. Halligan, as did two dozen other members of leading law firms.)
But it seems to me that this tit-for-tat goes only so far. President Bush succeeded in putting four decidedly conservative nominees on the D. C. Circuit. Three remain there today: Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas B. Griffith, and Brett M. Kavanaugh. The fourth was John G. Roberts Jr. It was his seat, which Chief Justice Roberts vacated on Sept. 29, 2005, to which Ms. Halligan was nominated. True, the Republicans didn’t get everything they wanted. But they seem determined to make sure that President Obama gets nothing.
Across the federal judiciary, confirmation has been proceeding at a slow crawl. This week, the Judiciary Committee held a scheduled confirmation hearing that could have accommodated five nominees. But because Republican senators claimed not to be finished reading the F.B.I. files of four of the nominees, only one, Paul J. Watford, nominated for the Ninth Circuit, was able to appear for his hearing. Nominees who clear the committee without opposition have to wait months for a floor vote because the Republicans won’t agree to a speedier schedule. Of 21 nominees now awaiting floor votes, 18 had no committee opposition, but only a handful, at most, will get a vote before the Senate recesses for the year.
Just when news on the judicial front could not get more discouraging, I came across something truly bizarre, a position paper by the new front-runner among Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich. Under the title Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution, Mr. Gingrich launches a 28-page attack on “lawless judges” who need to be reined in “if we are going to retain American freedoms and American identity.”
The document, he writes, “serves as political notice to the public and to the legislative and judicial branches that a Gingrich administration will reject the theory of judicial supremacy and will reject passivity as a response to Supreme Court rulings that ignore executive and legislative concerns and which seek to institute policy changes that more properly rest with Congress.” By rejecting passivity, Mr. Gingrich means impeaching judges for “unconstitutional” rulings or, failing to muster the two-thirds majority necessary for impeachment, simply abolishing their positions.
Much of the document is a grab bag of long familiar right-wing talking points (Judges who acknowledge foreign law? A threat to “American sovereignty!”) It is also just plain sloppy, misspelling Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name throughout. But truly head-spinning is the tenuous hold that this screed, from a onetime history professor, has on American history.
Mr. Gingrich writes that the contemporary “power grab by the Supreme Court” is a “modern phenomenon and a dramatic break from all previous American history.” (Anyone remember the court’s response to the New Deal?) Rebuking the court for substituting its will for that of Congress is downright strange, given that it is the Republicans who have run to the federal courts, imploring judges to strike down the Congressionally enacted Affordable Care Act.
Perhaps strangest of all is Mr. Gingrich’s attack on Cooper v. Aaron, the court’s celebrated response to the Little Rock school crisis of 1958. The unanimous opinion, signed individually by all nine justices for emphasis, held that Arkansas and all other states were bound by the court’s interpretation of the equal protection guarantee four years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education. Cooper v. Aaron was, as Justice Breyer writes in his recent book, Making Our Democracy Work, essential in its time and part of the “hard-earned victory for the rule of law” that the Little Rock story became. Newt Gingrich is unmoved. Cooper v. Aaron’s assertion of the Supreme Court’s authority, he writes, was “factually and historically false.”
Thinking back to Ms. Halligan’s failed nomination, I actually don’t disagree with everything in Mr. Gingrich’s manifesto. Four words in boldface type on page 20 caught my attention: “Electing the right Senators.”
The Willard Watch: Garry Wills wonders, "Why is this man laughing?"
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"He opens his mouth wide, emits a very loud sound, and gesticulates: that is to say, he is laughing. But he's not laughing like the rest of them: his laughter feels like a copy among originals." (Milan Kundera, not about the Incorporated Willard but about a man he had seen many years before in a crowd, laughing uncomprehendingly and uncomfortably)
"If I have never forgotten this tiny episode it is because it was a brand-new experience for me: I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition."
Certain behaviors seem always to have come naturally to our Willard, like his now-celebrated prep-school merry prank when, taking on the role of lead jackal in a band of overprivileged sociopaths, he joyfully assaulted and gleefully lopped off the long locks of a fellow student he had decided was gay. Many everyday behaviors, however, seem beyond his capacity even to simulate -- and in many cases it's not for want of trying.
It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?
Does it mean: "I know you are saying something critical about me, and I don't know how to answer it, so I'll just pretend that you did not mean it seriously"?
Or: "I want to show I am just a regular fellow, so I'll try out my regular-fellow laugh"?
Or: "I hope you will take what I just said as something humorous, though I doubt it, but I'll see if I can start a laughing chain reaction"?
Or: "I want to change the subject, but there is no natural way to do that, so I'll just throw in this comic rictus as a non-sequitur"?
Or: "The Cheshire Cat could evanesce by leaving just a smile behind, so maybe I can avoid attention by disappearing away from my laugh"?
It's at this point that Garry offers us Milan Kundera's indelible description of an instance of senseless laughing he encountered, as recounted in his essay "The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevsky: The Idiot" (included in the essay collection Encounter). We've already read a couple of crucial chunks, but here's a fuller version of the Wills citation:
[Kundera] finds examples of humorless humor in the defensive-aggressive response of Prince Mishkin to other people's senseless laughter.
Or he sees it as Mishkin's ill-focused expression of defiance. Or he sees it in a woman's derisive response to Mishkin's inconsequence.
But then Kundera describes an experience of his own. He saw a man standing uncomfortably in a crowd, not knowing what to do, and therefore he laughs when others do, not knowing why they do it but hoping this will make him fit in:
He opens his mouth wide, emits a very loud sound, and gesticulates: that is to say, he is laughing. But he's not laughing like the rest of them: his laughter feels like a copy among originals. If I have never forgotten this tiny episode it is because it was a brand-new experience for me: I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition.
Garry wonders if this isn't "the best description of Romney's idiosyncratic barking."
Does he "emit a very loud sound" to put on the uniform of ordinary citizenness that is foreign to him, hoping "to avoid recognition"? If so, he is no more successful than was the laughing man Kundera observed. If anything, such random outbursts just make everyone else feel uneasy. Rather than fitting in, he drives off.
Just as there are people who dismiss the significance of Willard's prep-school bullying, despite the clear indication that it ideally prefigures the "elite attack-pack" mentality that seems to underlie his entire adult career, there will no doubt be people who write this matter of Willard's non-laughter off as irrelevant, like NYRB commenter hedgehog6, who wrote:
The issue of his laugh is a side-show, fair game for pundits and comedians. Does it tell us much else? Is he nervous; is public psychoanalysis of the trait that helpful? I doubt it. It is, perhaps, even a relief that this candidate cannot be as carefully physically choreographed as some others. What is far more disturbing is his persistent inability to connect with average workers, his inability to articulate an understanding of people outside his own narrow world.
The thing is, hedgehog6: Aren't Willard's creepy impersonations of laughter all about "his persistent inability to connect with average workers" and "his inability to articulate an understanding of people outside his own narrow world."
Does Social Media Have A Role To Play In Politics?
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Buck McKeon may not understand social media, but he knows how to monetize drones & killer robots
Lucky for Blue America Jacquie keeps up our Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Otherwise we wouldn't have any. Or I'd have to learn new tricks. Woof! Yesterday I got an e-mail from one of the Blue America candidates who's typically plugged in to how to utilize social media for campaigning.
The primary election is only two weeks away, and it has certainly been an interesting campaign.
So far we have had three candidate debates to discuss our vision for the district, Southern California, and the United States. The incumbent, however, has refused to show up to any of them.
Even when I offered to work around his schedule to find a time to participate in a debate, Congressman Howard “Buck” McKeon has actively ignored our calls.
For me, these debates are job interviews. For him, they are performance reviews. Our elected officials need to be kept accountable.
That’s why we have launched a new Facebook timeline: Buck’s Bad Record. It highlights the questionable ethics and extreme positions that McKeon has taken during his 20 years in Congress.
None of that would have meant much to FDR, LBJ or Ronald Reagan. But I think any of them looking at the way political campaigning has been evolving would have recognized that it was a far more effective communication than the press release sent out at the same time by McKeon's strongest challenger among Republicans in the June 5th jungle primary. Dante Acosta makes some good points and the substance is all there. But the whole mode is outdated... like McKeon's own efforts.
Republican Challenger to 25th District Congressman, Howard “Buck” McKeon Reacts to McKeon’s Statements on Raising Taxes to Pay for Pentagon Spending
The campaign to elect Dante Acosta for Congress takes note of comments made by current 25th District Congressman Buck McKeon insinuating that he’d raise taxes on hard working Americans before ever considering cutting funding to the Pentagon.
“Congressman McKeon’s continued push to preserve the bloated cost of the Pentagon comes at the expense of hard-working Americans who cannot find jobs or are under-employed,” said 25th Congressional Candidate Dante Acosta. The Republican candidate who is challenging Congressman McKeon went on to say, “While the middle class is asking for fiscal vigilance, lower taxes and less regulations on families and small businesses, Congressman McKeon is talking about more unaccountable spending.” Mr. Acosta went on to point out that U.S. military leadership, Congress and the President have not proposed a unified plan or defined goal for the continuing war in Afghanistan yet continue to demand ever larger sums of money for this war.
Dante Acosta is challenging fellow Republican incumbent Congressman Howard “Buck” McKeon for his seat in Congress because he feels that Mr. McKeon has lost touch with his constituency as evidenced by his slow reaction to an Afghanistan force-protection debacle that cost Mr. Acosta the life of his son, Specialist Rudy A. Acosta in March, 2011. McKeon is also under heavy criticism in the district for a lack of leadership on a major quality of life issue affecting the Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley communities that make up a majority of the district. “Congressman McKeon used to serve the district but now he serves the Republican caucus, multi-national corporations like Cemex and the military hardware industry.” Acosta is referring to the Mexican concrete mining firm Cemex which was granted mining rights by the Bureau of Land Management long before Santa Clarita became a growing city of over 167,000 residents. The project, which the city has been fighting in court for decades, will greatly compromise air quality, increase truck traffic on the rural 2-lane road on which the mine is located and lower home values on properties in the epicenter of what could become the largest concrete mining operation in American history.
“When you take Mr. McKeon’s exhortation that struggling American taxpayers must shoulder additional taxes without any sacrifice to the Pentagon’s budget along with his inattention to the Cemex Mine issue and a growing detachment from district voters, the message becomes clear, it’s time to send the 20+ year Congressman into retirement so that a new generation of Conservative leadership can arise and serve the constituents of the 25Th Congressional District”, Mr. Acosta added.
Who, beyond a political junkie, is going to even try to get beyond that title? Autumn Caviness at the Texas Tribune explains how-- and why-- a "Like" is the new yard sign for young voters-- and even less young voters who are evolving with the times.
A 2009 Pew Research Center study indicates that 10 percent of internet users ages 18 and older have used a social networking site for some sort of political or civic engagement. With just younger voters, 18 to 29, that number jumps to 37 percent.
That's not exactly a tidal wave of civic engagement. But Thor Lund, the University of Texas at Austin's student body president, says that for college students, it feels like marching in the streets.
“Social media is a huge tool to get people interested in things, and honestly, the biggest way to create interest-- to spur the civic engagement-- is numbers, people being involved,” Lund said. “So whether or not someone thinks it’s a civic engagement issue that they’re starting out and that they’re trying to do, when people get behind an idea, the power of people is amazing.”
And when you've got a full semester and an evening job, being able to click "like" before studying can make you feel engaged without taking up too much time.
“When we’re tabling and fliering, we let folks know, hey, like us on Facebook, even if you can’t come at every meeting, even if you can’t be there physically, at least be aware of what we’re doing,” said Huey Fischer, president of the University Democrats at UT. “So that way, when you do have time, when you can make a commitment, you’ll know what’s up.”
Morley Winograd, co-author of Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America, views hitting the "like" button as comparable to putting up a traditional political yard sign. So when friends visit your Facebook page, as when dropping by your house, they'll see who and what you support.
Winograd says making these initial statements of support online can then lead to a stronger outward showing of support.
“Certainly there is that level of engagement at that point, but I think real engagement involves translating that online enthusiasm into offline activity," he said.
Does it mean that stodgy old curmudgeons like-- to just take two examples, one from each party-- Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) will fall to edgy, young political leaders? Stranger things have happened and 2012 is not exactly shaping up as the Congressional Year of The Incumbent. It might be worth noting that almost all of the incumbents defeated so far this year have been older and less technologically savvy than their opponents:
Mean Jean Schmidt (60) was beaten by Brad Wenstrup (54) Tim Holden (55) was beaten by Matt Cartwright (50) Richard Lugar (80) was beaten by Richard Mourdock (60) Don Manzullo (68) was beaten by Adam Kinzinger (34) Special case: Dennis Kucinich (65) was beaten by Marcy Kaptur (65)
And speaking of Reyes, the El Paso Times has always endorsed him in the past... but not this time. And, largely because of younger, more connected voters, O'Rourke is beating Silvestre in early voting 52-45%.
El Paso has struggled with ineffective, bickering leadership over the years. But that has changed in recent years with the emergence of young, dedicated public servants on County Commissioners Court, City Council and our state legislative delegation.
Sending Beto O'Rourke to Congress is an important next step in choosing leadership that positions El Paso to be a leading international city in the 21st century.
Recommending a change in El Paso's member of the House of Representatives isn't something we do lightly. It is an institution where seniority matters. The 16th Congressional District has had only three representatives in the past 48 years. And the Times editorial board, along with our Community Advisory Board, was split on our endorsement choice.
But it's time for a change. And O'Rourke brings the background and passion that El Paso needs.
...El Paso is at a crossroads. The improved performance in recent years of Commissioners Court and City Council show that passionate, dedicated young leadership can reshape a community and help move it in the right direction.
O'Rourke has been an important part of that change. He can continue that work if we elect him to the House of Representatives. He is the right choice in the Democratic primary, and will be the right choice for the community in November.
That's bad news for Reyes, just as the Campaign for Primary Accountability [CPA] has started firing on all engines in the district. They go after incumbents, of both parties, who have, like Reyes, a record of corruption. And they have the financial resources to make a difference. Their efforts are hurting Reyes badly right now. They've spent close to $200,000 on the race so far. Earlier this month $95,000 went into ads about Reyes’ record of taking money from Washington lobbyists for himself and his family. Reyes went whining to the media and CPA doubled their efforts against him. Their statement responding to Reyes' lame excuses:
Let’s be clear: The more Silvestre Reyes distorts his record, the more the Campaign for Primary Accountability will spend to make sure voters know the truth before the primary on May 29th.
If Reyes wants to complain about money being spent in this election, he should talk to his hand – the hand that takes millions from fat cat Washington lobbyists and stuffs it in his pocket.
If he wants CPA to stop running ads, he can stop with the lame excuses. As long as he continues distorting his record, we will continue spending to educate voters.
It's Not Fair To Call Politicians Morons Just Because They Disagree With You... Unless They ARE Morons
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Most politicians are too cagey to submit to the kind of standardized testing they've forced on students and are trying to force on teachers. So is there any objective way to measure a politician's intelligence (beyond just his or her record of accomplishment)? Probably not. BUT the Sunlight Foundation just conducted an interesting experiment that is somewhat helpful in measuring politicians' intelligence-- at least as much as intelligence can be correlated to the ability to communicate in formal speech. It may not be definitive in helping explain, for example, why Paul Ryan is as fixated as an adolescent fan boy on tawdry, low-grade novelist Ayn Rand, or why he keeps coming up with deranged proposals, couched in "serious" Madison Avenue-speak, to wreck America's social fabric, but the test shows him at a 9th grade level, which... well, make a lot of sense to anyone who has followed Paul Ryan's politics. He's been able to hoodwink the Beltway media-- much of which is at a 6th grade level-- but Ryan is a clown and has always been a clown. He sounds "intelligent" to the same kind of people who buy into the hype that Newt Gingrich and Rich Nixon are legitimate intellectuals. They're not and neither is Ryan.
Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.
Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing down of Congress, others will see as more effective communications. And lawmakers of both parties still speak above the heads of the average American, who reads at between an 8th and 9th grade level.
Today’s Congress speaks at about a 10.6 grade level, down from 11.5 in 2005. By comparison, the U.S. Constitution is written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level. The Gettysburg Address comes in at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level. Most major newspapers are written at between an 11th and 14th grade level.
All these analyses use the Flesch-Kincaid test, which produces the 'reads at a n-th grade level' terminology that is likely familiar to many readers. At its core, Flesch-Kincaid equates higher grade levels with longer words and longer sentences. It is important to understand the limitations of this metric: it tells us nothing about the clarity or correctness of a passage of text. But although an admittedly crude tool, Flesch-Kincaid can nonetheless provide insights into how different legislators speak, and how Congressional speech has been changing. ...Overall, the complexity of speech in the Congressional Record has declined steadily since 2005, with the drop among Republicans slightly outpacing that for Democrats.
You can look at the entire chart here but here are the 10 worst performing Members of Congress.
As you can see, all of them are Republicans and most of them are teabaggers and freshmen. The only senior congressmember in the lot is Todd Akin of Missouri who has a well-earned reputation as one of Congress' dimmest bulbs. The GOP is running him for Senate this year. Ryan performed at a 9.66 level, the 55th worst of the entire 530 people analyzed in Congress. He was fractionally better than Ted Poe, a lunatic fringe Texas backbencher and birther who has been asked to keep quiet and not embarrass the party with any more rambling quotations from his idol, KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, and to stop trying to force Christian prayers on all military casualties regardless of their own religion or their families' preferences. So, Ryan's a tiny fraction smarter than that.
Amanda Terkel wrote up the study for HuffPo Monday and concludes that members of Congress are now talking, on average, at the level of high school sophomores, a precipitous decline due almost entirely to the GOP teabagger freshman class. The lowest score, of course, went to South Carolina teabagger Mick Mulvaney, considered a joke even among Republican staffers, who is the only Member of Congress who speaks on a level below an average 8th grader. Mulvaney is more of a doofus than Michele Bachmann (9.52), Aaron Schock's boyfriend Adam Kinzinger (8.99), John Bircher Paul Broun (9.30), Lynn "Mr. 10 Commandments" Westmoreland (9.54), dog-lover Steve King (10.14) or Congress' dumbest closet case, Patrick McHenry (10.21). Even raging homophobic imbecile Virginia Foxx beat him with a 10.68!
Anyway, back to Amanda at HuffPo. After examining the data, she came to the same conclusion I did-- and anyone would have to: "The members speaking at the lowest grade levels tend to be freshmen Republicans."
Before 2005, Republicans spoke, on average, at a slightly higher grade level than Democrats. Since then, Democrats have been slightly higher.
Sunlight did not reach a definitive conclusion on why lawmakers' speech patterns have become simpler over time, although Drutman wrote in a blog post, "Perhaps it reflects lawmakers speaking more in talking points, and increasingly packaging their floor speeches for YouTube. Gone, perhaps, are the golden days when legislators spoke to persuade each other, thoughtfully wrestled with complex policy trade-offs, and regularly quoted Shakespeare."
So now we get a freak show like Ted Poe quoting the founder of the KKK instead. Wouldn't you rather hear Paul Ryan coming out with something this based on his understanding of Hamlet:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry... As my mentor Ayn has explained This above all: to thine own self be true.
Bain Capital-- How Did Cory Booker Wreck His Career?
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The DWT art department rarely asks any questions. They just send art and tell me to post a blog about it. But yesterday they did ask a question:
Why would Romney's leeching organization be called Bain? That is identical in pronunciation the Bane...
bane (bn) n. 1. Fatal injury or ruin: "Hath some fond lover tic'd thee to thy bane?" (George Herbert).
2. a. A cause of harm, ruin, or death
Earlier this year, on January 8, while campaigning in New Hampshire, then candidate Newt Gingrich opened a can of worms-- and a can of whoopass on Willard-- by publicly uttering what many were already thinking: “Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.” Two days later a second GOP candidate, Texas Governor Rick Perry, took up the same theme-- and expanded on it, at least rhetorically, this time in South Carolina: "Mitt Romney and Bain Capital were involved with what I call vulture capitalism.” Later the same day, in an interview with the National Journal, he went further in denigrating the Bain model that is the crowning achievement of Romney's public life:
“Instead of trying to work with them to try to find a way to keep the jobs and to get them back on their feet, it’s all about how much money can we make, how quick can we make it, and then get out of town and find the next carcass to feed upon”
Gingrich, whose $4.8 million campaign debt has turned him into another word for the world's oldest profession, "a Romney surrogate," indicated to CNN's Piers Morgan he needs to smelling salts now to cope with the attacks by President Obama on Romney's record at Bain. "I’m very surprised that President Obama went down this road." Surprised? Maybe someone on President Obama's team noticed the only significant contribution Newt made to the 2012 campaign for president, the 28 minute film, When Mitt Romney Came To Town which has been watched in its entirety by a quarter million people. It's worth watching-- or watching again-- in light of the Republican hysteria over the gall of the Obama campaign raising the issue of Romney's record-- and using prominent Republicans to do it for him.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker stepped right in it on Meet The Press last weekend, doing what conflicted, conservative Democrats do-- including, all too often, the Obama administration: they twist themselves into a knot kissing the ass of the Wall Street special interests that are the natural allies in almost all ways-- economic success being the exception-- of the Republican Party.
Booker's career-- much like Rahm Emanuel's, Artur Davis' and Harold Ford's-- has been financed by Wall Street. They picked him out early, the same way they picked out Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor-- as an energetic young politician with no ethical compunctions about bribery who could go far in the cesspool of politics. Monday, Josh Israel, did some digging around for Think Progress.
A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor-- back in 2002-- suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.
Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000)-- all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage.
He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the “Booker Team for Newark” joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector-- including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million-- again making this a sizable chunk.
In all-- just in his first Mayoral run-- Booker’s committees received more than $565,000 from the people he was defending. At least $36,000 of that came from folks at Romney’s old firm.
Joe Biden, the guy was less a creation of Wall Street. And last week his explanation of what Bain is all about had, for him, surprising clarity: “Romney made sure the guys at top got to play by a different set of rules, he ran massive debts, and the middle class lost. And folks, he thinks this experience will help our economy? Where I come from, past is prologue.” Yesterday I ook a taxi to JFK on my way back to L.A. The driver, an Egyptian-American, who hasn't missed voting in a presidential election since George H.W. Bush ran-- and who he admires and voted for-- told me he is horrified by Romney. He explained to me that businessmen only care about making money for themselves and their circle and that if Romney won, he would be an even worse president than Bush II. I know that from personal experience with Romney's Bain model.
I've written about it before and I didn't need to hear it back in January from David Axelrod, but who was correct in pointing out about Bain that “They closed down more than 1,000 plants, stores and offices. They outsourced tens of thousands of jobs, and they took 12 companies to bankruptcy. I don’t think those are the values that people want to animate our economy. He is not a job creator, he is a corporate raider. Those aren’t the values that we want to lead our economy.” My own Bain experience was at TimeWarner where I was a division president. (I ran Reprise Records at Warner Bros and was mortified to see the Bain people come in and loot the company, drain it of assets, drop artists we had developed over decades so they could line their own pockets-- and then leave the barely-living carcass for the Russian Mafia to pick over.
On he Democratic side of this story, it's important to remember that many Democratic politicians-- maybe even most Democratic politicians-- are as culpable as a garden variety Republican when it comes to taking money from banksters and other shady characters looking for people without morals they can bribe who will sell out their own constituents. So far this cycle, the finance sector has spent $253,290,163 on elections, 49.5% to Republicans and 31.2% to Democrats. Since 1989 they spent $1,710,713,286 on congressional races. Of that $936,860,394 went to Republicans and $761,397,793 went to Democrats. If current Members of the House were to be arrested and charged with accepting bribery based on taking big money from the banksters in return for services rendered the Top 3 criminals would be:
John Boehner (R-OH)- $6,653,176 Eric Cantor (R-VA)- $6,027,865 Spencer Bachus (R-AL)- $5,763,934
But waddling right up to the bar behind them would be another notorious crook Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, and former Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, who has accepted $5,155,543 in bribes from the financial criminal class he was supposed to be helping to regulate. And the 5 worst in the Senate are John McCain (R-AZ- $36,390,767), John Kerry (D-MA- $20,043,114), Chuck Schumer (D-NY- $18,757,891), Joe Lieberman (I-CT- $10,891,541), and Miss McConnell (R-KY- $6,841,197).
Republicans are bad, very bad, but that doesn't make Democrats good. Are they all on the take? No, but most of them are. Who doesn't take money from the banksters? On the Senate side, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Herb Kohl (D-WI). And on the House side Walter Jones (R-NC), Hansen Clarke (D-MI) and... um... that's about it I'm afraid. But not all Democrats have sold their souls to private equity the way the GOP has-- or the way Rahm Emanuel has or the way Harold Ford has or the way Cory Booker has. Robert Reich sure hasn't-- and he's urging Obama to go on the attack against casino gambling in the form of both Bain and JPMorganChase... and to resurrect Glass-Steagall for real.
I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase.
That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.
It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy.
It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of the betting parlor over the real business of America, financial innovation rather than product innovation.
It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy.
It’s also why Obama has to come out swinging about JPMorgan. The JPMorgan Chase debacle would have been prevented if the Volcker Rule were sufficiently strict, prohibiting banks from using commercial deposits to make bets except very specific offsetting bets (hedges) on narrow classes of trades.
But Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan have been lobbying like mad to loosen the Volcker Rule and widen that exception to include the very kind of reckless bets JPMorgan made. And they’re still at it, as evidenced by Dimon’s current claim that the rule that eventually emerges would allow those bets.
As a practical matter, the Volcker Rule is hopeless. It was intended to be Glass-Steagall lite-- a more nuanced version of the original Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. But JPMorgan has proven that any nuance-- any exception-- will be stretched beyond recognition by the big banks.
So much money can be made when these bets turn out well that the big banks will stop at nothing to keep the spigot open.
There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole. Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, and break them up.
At the same time, there’s no point to the “carried interest” loophole that allows private-equity managers like Mitt Romney to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent, when they’ve risked no money of their own.
If private equity were good for America it wouldn’t need this or the other tax preference it depends on, elevating debt over equity. But the private equity industry has huge political clout, which is why these tax preferences remain.
Get it? Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem. The President should be leading the charge against both.
Do Congressional Bribes Actually Result In Bad Policies? Oy
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It's beyond outrageous that our elected officials get to write the rules that govern their own behavior even to the point of twisting the meaning of bribery to exclude their own most basic criminality. Jack Abramoff, the Republican Party operative who went to prison for bribing dozens of Republican congressmen-- none of whom joined him behind bars-- explained DC bribery succinctly in his post-prison tome, Capitol Punishment:
[C]ontributions from parties with an interest in legislation are really nothing but bribes. Sure, it's legal for the most part. Sure, everyone in Washington does it. Sure it's the way the system works. It's one of Washington's dirty little secrets-- but it's bribery just the same...
Simple and straight-forward... unlike the statutes that are basically written by corrupt congressmen to protect themselves from prosecution and allow themselves to continue taking billions of dollars in bribes to finance their careers in return for serving the special interests (i.e.- bribers) at the expense and to the detriment of their own constituents. And yes, this is the true meaning of Washington "bipartisanship." This past weekend the Chicago Tribune and New York Times took up the case of how toxic home products are regulated by Congress to benefit not consumers but campaign donors from the toxic home products manufacturers and distributors.
The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries-- Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers-- waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.
Nick Kristof in the Timestried to make sense out of the Tribune research and to put it into context. He calls it a superb "case study of everything that is wrong with money politics."
Chances are that if you’re sitting on a couch right now, it contains flame retardants. This will probably do no good if your house catches fire-- although it may release toxic smoke. There is growing concern that the chemicals are hazardous, with evidence mounting of links to cancer, fetal impairment and reproductive problems.
He explains the history of how tobacco lobbyists mounted a surreptitious campaign for flame retardant furniture, rather than safe cigarettes, as the best way to reduce house fires, starting a phony advocacy group called Citizens for Fire Safety that describes itself as “a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, fire departments and industry leaders.” But it actually only had 3 members, "which also happen to be the three major companies that manufacture flame retardants: Albemarle Corporation, ICL Industrial Products and Chemtura Corporation." They hired a typically crooked doctor to make up compelling stories that would ease corrupt lawmakers consciences as they gobbled up bribes to pass laws to enrich the companies who were paying them off.
Sad that neither newspaper offers a list of congressmen who need prison terms for the great damage done only statements like this:
It’s not easy for a democracy to regulate technical products like endocrine disruptors that may offer great benefits as well as complex risks, especially when the hazards remain uncertain. A generation ago, Big Tobacco played the system like a violin, and now Big Chem is doing the same thing.
This campaign season, you’ll hear fervent denunciations of “burdensome government regulation.” When you do, think of the other side of the story: your home is filled with toxic flame retardants that serve no higher purpose than enriching three companies. The lesson is that we need not only safer couches but also a political system less distorted by toxic money.
And it's the system itself that is corrupt-- from the ability of Congress to write laws governing its own criminal misbehavior to the way power is achieved inside Congress itself. We've often pointed out that congressmembers rise inside the leadership-- and get preferential committee assignments and chairmanships-- based on their ability to solicit and aggregate bribes and distribute them among their colleagues. That's why conservatives rise in power and progressives rarely do. Progressives, like Raul Grijalva and Jerry Nadler-- two perfect examples-- are motivated by policy. Hunting up campaign cash and payoffs in beneath their dignity and neither is even vaguely motivated by an endeavor that consumes the entire political lives of sleazy operators like Eric Cantor (R-VA), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), John Boehner (R-OH), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Steve Israel (D-NY) and Buck McKeon (R-CA). It's how we pick our leaders-- and it stinks to high heaven.
Bob Mankoff heralds "The New Yorker"'s new "Page-Turner" blog with a bevy of appropriately themed "New Yorker" cartoons
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Interviews with writers are one of the things promised for The New Yorker's new "Page-Turner" books blog
"If you were to boil your book down to a few words, what would be its message?"
by Ken
Last Tuesday The New Yorker inaugurated a new blog called "Page-Turner," blurbed as "Criticism, contention, and conversation about books that matter," and cartoon editor Bob Mankoff celebrated the blessed event in his newsletter-slash-blogpost last week, "The Great American Books Blog."
The blog in fact kicked off with a cartoon slide show curated by our Bob, "a selection of New Yorker cartoons about the literary life. The first actual books post followed: "What We're Reading: Tony Judt, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, and More," a superpost of "notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week" -- Dexter Filkins on Judt and Timothy Snyder's Thinking the Twentieth Century, Sarah Larson on Didion's out-of-print Miami (themed to a family vacation there), and Daniel Mendelsohn ("normally a one-book-at-a-time guy") doing a three-book parlay of Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Gray Falcon.
As I write (on Monday; I planned this post for yesterday, but it gave way to my post remembering Robin Gibb), the most recent "Page-Turner" entry, posted by Maile Meloy, is "the first post in a series where we ask New Yorker writers what book they have revisited most often." Meloy muses on the phenomenon of rereading, or sometimes hearing audio-book versions of books already read, before settling on Maile Meloy the excellent, easy-to-understand choice of Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, "the only book I've read three times (or more) on paper" ("It helped me understand what a story collection was, and should be"), with different sets of favorites each time.
IN HIS NEWSLETETER-BLOGPOST,BOB MANKOFF ASKS: "Did you ever have a blog that you just couldn’t put down?
"Well, you’ve got one now," he says. "Page-Turner," you'll recall, spotlights "the three C's" about "books that matter," and Bob, combing The New Yorker's cartoon archives, has come up with illustrations for all three:
"Criticism" [cartoon by William Hamilton, born 1939]
"Sorry, old man. Because of the weak imagery, scanty plot, and pedestrian language in your latest, we've turned your table over to Joyce Carol Oates."
"Contention" [cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan]
"I don't just want to write. I want to be in literary feuds."
"Conversation" [cartoon by Chon Day, 1907-2000]
"Which ten books would you have brought, if you'd known?"
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL THAT'S PROMISED . . .
. . . for "Page-Turner." There are also going to be:
"Staff recommendations" [cartoon by Harry Bliss] "Updates from the publishing world" [cartoon by David Sipress]
"Great news! Your novel is in a medium-size pile in the middle of the floor about four feet from the left side of Oprah's assistant's desk."
And "interviews with writers," as illustrated by the cartoon by the great Edward Koren (born 1935) at the top of this post.
PLUS "MUCH, MUCH MORE," SAYS BOB,
including a fiction podcast (which will nevertheless be checked for accuracy by The New Yorker's legendary fact-checking department) and photography (I actually don't know what's going to be in this section, although I'm told it may feature racy shots of books au naturel, without their dust jackets). Have I left anything out? Mais certainement, la spécialité de la maison -- les cartoons. But don't worry, Francophobes, they're not in French, and there's a slide show right here -- bet you can't view just one.
For notes on the cartoonists, I've consulted the "New Yorker Cartoonists A-Z" list-in-progress on New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin's website, a site frequently cited by Bob Mankoff as an invaluable resource. Here, by the way, is Maslin's own tale of his first New Yorker cartoon (in 1978), in Bob's "First Cartoon" series.
left to right: Eric Cantor, random GOP doofus, shady right-wing gay activist Paul Morabito
A devout Mormon and a reflexive old-fashioned bigot, Buck McKeon is a classic anti-gay ranter and raver. He donated his own money and campaign money to end marriage equality in California and he uses his perch as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee to denigrate America's LGBT fighting men and women and to try to make their lives more miserable with his widely repudiated and obsolete notions from the distant past. But his deranged homophobia-- in a moderate suburban L.A. County district-- has taken another twist, one that is never far from the surface of all things McKeon-related: corruption.
Last month we introduced shady gay war industries lobbyist Paul Morabito into the McKeon narrative. McKeon and Morabito, a former board member of a national gay activist group, GLAAD, went out for lunch and McKeon illegally solicited a bribe from Morabito for his wife's Assembly campaign. McKeon has been asking war contractors and arms makers to funnel money into his household by donating to his wife. It's blatant-- no other state legislative candidates have been getting these kinds of large bribes from major arms makers-- and it's illegal. McKeon is also officially under investigation by the House Ethics Committee but his serial flouting of election law should bring him under the purview of more serious law enforcement. But there's also the sheer hypocrisy of McKeon taking bribes from Morabito. McKeon has the worst record on LGBT equality of any California Member of Congress. He voted for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, a constitutional ban on marriage equality, a ban LGBT adoptions in the District of Columbia. He voted against the repeal of DADT, the 2009 hate crimes bill, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. He has a 0% rating from the Human Rights Campaign. Last year, he tried to write language into the National Defense Authorization Act prohibiting military chaplains from officiating same-sex weddings on federal property, even after the repeal of DADT. Defeating him has been a priority on the Act Blue Worst Homophobes in Congress page. So it might not have seemed all that odd that McKeon, back in 1992, said:
"I think that, politically in this district, taking money from gays is just not a smart thing to do."
Is that because he thinks his constituents are more bigoted, small-minded and deranged than he is? Back then he returned money that was donated to his campaign by the Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP gay advocacy group. An independent candidate running against him at the time, Rick Pamplin, who supported equality, pointed out McKeon's hypocrisy in accepting the cash when he thought no one would notice it and then giving it back when someone did.
"It was the most crass, insincere form of political manipulation I've ever seen," Pamplin said. Homosexual Republicans who regarded McKeon as an ally may have made the difference in his 705-vote primary victory over Assemblyman Phillip D. Wyman and four others, he added.
"Once he won the primary, he changed his position," said Pamplin... "He returned their money; he stabbed them in the back."
So here we are, exactly 20 years later and McKeon-- as homophobic and bigoted as ever-- is illegally soliciting money money from an openly gay activist who works as a lobbyist for his wife's campaign. McKeon's campaign refuses to discuss any of the mounting bribery allegations against him and specifically will not comment on the money he took from Morabito (a major Eric Cantor donor and real estate scam artist and con man)-- or are they planning to return that after the June 5th primary too? 'Til then, this is on the public record:
Are Deep Red Bastions Of Reactionary Politics Like Arizona And Tennessee Really In Play For November?
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McCain won his home state with 54%, not one of his best showings. Obama didn't make a serious effort there either. Obama didn't make a serious effort in Tennessee either and McCain beat him with 57%-- 1,479,178 to 1,087,437. There are much redder Republican states, like Alabama (61% McCain), Idaho (61% McCain), Wyoming (65% McCain), Oklahoma (66% McCain) and Utah (63%). And there are states where Romney won't be wasting any resources this year- states like New York (63% Obama), California (61% Obama), Hawaii (72% Obama), Massachusetts (62% Obama), Vermont (68% Obama)... not to mention the District of Columbia, where Obama crushed McCain 93-7%.
Indiana, which Obama won in 2008, is probably out of reach this time, but many of the states with the really extremist state legislatures might not be. Buyers' remorse after two years of deranged ideological insanity from Republicans in state capitols from Maine and New Hampshire to Tennessee and Arizona are helping Democrats up and down the ticket. Republicans are looking at wipeouts in Maine and New Hampshire this year, where they had big victories in 2010. They are expected two lose both House seats in New Hampshire as well as the state legislature and both the state legislature and an open Senate seat in Maine. Teabagger craziness worked in 2010; it looks like it won't in 2012. In fact, Republicans are so terrified that Obama voters could punish right-wing extremism in Arizona by awarding the state's electoral votes to Obama that there is serious talk by the lunatic fringe Republican secretary of state, Ken Bennett, about keeping him off the ballot there! That may help Bennett's gubernatorial prospects in the GOP primary in 2014 but it's making Arizona voters reassess the value of supporting an organization as deranged as the Republican Party. According to a new poll in Tennessee, there's a similar dynamic going on in that state as well.
President Barack Obama has pulled into a virtual tie with presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in traditionally conservative Tennessee, according to a new Vanderbilt University poll.
The poll also found that Tennesseans weren’t thrilled with the Republican-led General Assembly’s frequent focus on social, cultural and religious issues this year.
...“Tennessee is clearly a red state,” said John Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt. “But these data show that the public is much more moderate than our state legislature.”
The poll of 1,002 Tennessee residents who are 18 and older found 42 percent would vote for Romney and 41 percent for Obama if the election were held now.
...Bill Freeman, a top fundraiser for Obama in Tennessee, said the overall poll result reflects a “tightening” the president’s campaign had already noticed.
“We’ve been tracking it for some time,” Freeman said Thursday. “We’ve watched it go from a solid-Republican (state) to a leaning-Republican to, we believe, a toss-up state now. We think we’re just a point or two behind and that winning Tennessee is in our grasp."
...[T]he poll found Tennesseans weren’t as happy with the General Assembly’s focus on certain issues as many legislators seemed to believe.
Just 15 percent said lawmakers “spent the appropriate amount of time addressing social, cultural or religious issues” during this year’s session, and 22 percent said they didn’t spend enough time on them. A larger number, 42 percent, said lawmakers spent too much time on such matters.
Some of the General Assembly’s forays into issues such as “gateway sexual activity,” debating evolution in classrooms and permitting the carrying of guns into business parking lots have given Tennessee “a black eye nationally,” Geer said.
Just 22 percent of the people surveyed said it was more important to protect the rights of handgun owners to carry their weapons into any commercial establishment than it was to protect the rights of business owners to set their own rules. More than 7 in 10 said the opposite.
“The public is not wild about this stuff,” said Geer, co-director of the poll, which was sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. “When you aggregate opinion in the state, it’s more moderate than the aggregate behavior of state legislators. On certain issues, like guns in parking lots, they were way out of step.”
And that, of course, brings up swing states with the same kind of deranged right-wing state legislatures-- especially Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia. Did Virginia Republicans' obsession with forced vaginal probes this year guarantee Obama a victory in that state? Did the Wisconsin state government's wildly unpopular move against working families and towards unpopular and failed German-style Austerity hand that state to Obama on a silver platter?
