Truth in advertising: Republicans are focused "on the harm health care reform might bring to private health insurers"

Pretty damn good article here by Slate's Timothy Noah, one of the few decent journos at Slate, in J's opinion. One might almost go so far as to call him a J-fave, but that would be stretching it perhaps. Or at least, giving credit on a sliding curve; he's not as left as I am, despite that seeming to be the logical conclusion from many of his articles (from my point of view, of course), but he's at least pretty consistently in the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" to crib from Howard Dean.*

Anyway. Noah analyzes how the Republicans aren't even pretending to be for the average American anymore, instead fretting about private health insurers' profits. Noah:

Eschewing any pretense that their primary concern is for medical consumers and taxpayers, they focus on the harm health care reform might bring to private health insurers... The reasoning was (and remains) that holding the line on government spending is socialism. Letting the government pay in excess of the market price is capitalism. Surrendering to such Alice in Wonderland reasoning is insanity.

This follows a pretty good earlier column by Slater Christopher Beam -- who's somewhere below Noah but higher than average as far as Slaters in J's esteem -- about how Republicans are trying to use the language of "universal health care" to rebrand their same brand of "gee, if you have money, you can get access to it -- what's not universal about that?" Indeed, they refuse to define what universal even means to them, but Beam gives us a hint:

Under a [traditional] Republican plan, "universal access" means anyone can buy insurance if they want it, but they don't have to. The problem is, "access" is a slippery concept. George W. Bush famously said that "people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room." By that definition, "universal access" already exists.

It's worth noting that Noah also points out that Obama is not really seeming geared up to provide universal health care, in the article linked above, as well as in a month-old column here (first installment of Obama Soft-on-Health-care-watch here.

In news of something more completely different, Fire Mickey Kaus takes a brief jaunt from its primary, and quite laudable, goal (of firing Mickey Kaus), to ask WTF is up with Slate's XX Factor, a nominally female-perspective blog of various Slatesters. Suffice it to say, FMK is about as impressed with XX Factor as we here at Anekantavada are. (To be clear, that level of impressedness == not very. The best thing I can say about their average quality is that it allowed me to use the wonderful word "gormless" in context for the first time.

*To be clear, you don't have to be as Left as J to be a J-Fave, but left-liberal authors like Noah who are clearly smart enough to see the world as it is and who make trenchant criticisms of both parties yet still pretend that either party is an honest broker... I guess what I'm trying to say is, you have to be intellectually consistent, and Noah's points are so insightful and indicting of the current system sometimes, that I feel like it's a total cop-out for him to still back much of the mainstream system. Perhaps he's afraid to go farther within his own mind, for the sake of his job, or he really doesn't see what I perceive to be the gaping chasm between his analysis of US Politics and anything like even qualified support of the status quo, but, yeah... I feel like something's holding him back from truly revolutionary writing, as opposed to someone who really is completely consistent and logical within their own worldview. But that's just me, mayhaps.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing? Activism, Government, and Crowd-sourcing Schmrowd-sourcing

Interesting blog post from Jon Stahl here: "Chaotic, cacophonous, well meaning efforts that will inevitably add up to nothing" on crowd sourcing and the activism of the new generation, so to speak. Stahl and some people he quotes at length note the limitations of the "new" activism, Obama's millions-strong "constituency" and recommends some steps on real change -- including understanding that volunteerism, while laudable, will not alone make things better, and that philanthropy can't replace making the government work.

So interesting ideas. The post is a big old, but worth reading and ruminating on.

Clear-headed, sobering words on food

Fantastic interview with UK food policy researcher Tim Lang here from GRAIN's 2008 issue of Seedling. He says the world is "sleepwalking" its way through the food crisis, expresses his belief/analysis that the present crisis is not a "blip" as others were but rather presages long-term change for the worse (though in the short-term food prices may again lower for some brief period), lays out the 8 interconnected features under threat with today's "productionist" food system and politics, and expresses hopeful cynicism about the ability of humanity to change the system for the better before a dire and harsh shock to the system comes about in the form of even worse crises.

I used to think, until about five years ago, that an orderly transition was possible. I now wonder if we’ve missed the moment. I hope not. But events are now determining the room for manoeuvre. It’s more likely now that shock will change things. As a rationalist, I want that least. Shocks are messy with dire consequences. But certainly, it looks likely that we might be sleep-walking into a world in which blood flows, metaphorically and at times actually, due to mistakes over food policy. All of us need to raise our voices and our game to prevent those mistakes going unnoticed. Ultimately we have to side with food democracy over food control.

Read the rest of the insightful interview here; and if you're in the upstate New York area in a couple weeks, come see him give the Plenary talk at Visible Warnings: The World Food Crisis in Perspective, April 3 & 4 at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Government's "Angry-come-lately" on AIG

A seemingly good article by Steven Pearlstein at the WaPo on various ways we could've avoided paying the AIG bonuses without causing a crisis in the rule of law, as has been implied or even said by Wall Street, various members of the O Administration, and the media. The thing that gets me about this whole deal is that it obviously wasn't an unanticipated problem -- they (AIG) knew about the bonuses beforehand, and had to have known how it would play, and various articles have pointed to commentary from within the government with various officials having said things to the effect of "we knew about it earlier, but we couldn't really do anything so we didn't." Pearlstein makes some very commonsense articles that it was within both the government and AIG's power to take some reasonable steps much earlier to have avoided this whole shennanigan. For one thing, since the US Gov helped stop AIG from going into bankruptcy, Pearlstein points out:

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I suspect that when confronted with the prospect of a bankruptcy and a prolonged and public investigation, the sharpies in London and Connecticut might have been receptive to the idea of renegotiating those bonuses in favor of new contracts -- contracts that increased their base pay but tied their bonuses to success in reducing future taxpayer liabilities at AIG. Unfortunately, none of this seems to have occurred to Eddie "Good Hands" Liddy, the former Allstate executive who was supposedly brought in to dismantle AIG and sell it off in pieces for the benefit of the taxpayers and creditors. So far, all Eddie seems to have served up is a litany of complaints about what a bad hand he was dealt.

Read on the rest of "Wall Street's Dangerous Refusal to Learn" here.

Thomas Friedman's Dipshittery, Explained in 8 Panels

ZOMG.

Go here. A pithy summary of Thomas "My evidence is that it makes sense to me" Friedman. The cartoon is for this article which similarly disses Friedman, in a more effective-than not manner. I think Taibbi could've done better, and I don't know that that much snark is all that useful, but it's still damned funny, and damned accurate, in places.

What part of self-evident doesn't Scalia understand, aka We hold this important shit to be obvious, you Wackaloon

Mad good post over at PhysioProf on "Constitutional Originalism, Natural Law, and The Ninth Amendment." Now, J is not a fan of Natural Law when it is taken literally, as is believed by some libertarians -- that some rights somehow derive from the very status and being of human beings and the universe, such as right to property. I firmly believe rights are human-made and thus human-determined; that doesn't mean I believe they're arbitrary per se. There are rights that we have come to recognize as fundamental for dignified human life, and I do believe these are fundamental, based on the sort common-sense humanism of them (the right against arbitrary/unreasonable search and seizure, freedom of religion, freedom of press, the right to food security/food sovereignty, unreasonable restrictions of movement, etc. etc., such as one might see in our Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, still not ratified by the US Congress, btw).

Anyway. Read on, read PhysioProf -- I don't think he even swears in this one.

Preview:

Conservative legal theorists spend a lot of time talking about how the text of the Constitution should be construed only as it was understood at the time of the Founding and Ratification. Building on this idea, they rail against “judicial activism” and the “creation of new rights” that are not “found in the text” of the Constitution. This provides a theoretical basis for conservative claims that there is no Constitutionally protected right to many things they despise: gay marriage, abortion, health care, housing, food, etc.

As I will describe below, this textual originalism is bad history and bad law. Furthermore, this theory only has any jurisprudential legs at all because of an unfortunate happenstance of 20th Century Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Republicans: Saving the economy ruins the economy (seriously?)

There's been a meme that's been getting bigger and bigger, much to my profound annoyance; that of the right/Republicans claiming that not only did FDR's New Deal not help end the Great Depression, but rather helped prolong it. The Heritage Foundation, some kooky hyper-libertarian on Colbert a couple months ago, Ron Paul on Bill Maher's Real Time with Bill Maher. (Not that Ron Paul isn't a kooky hyper-libertarian.)

David Sirota wrote at Salon two months ago about this, as part of a larger analysis of Obama's stimulus package.

Sirota:

[Obama rejected] conservatives' increasingly loud claims that the New Deal "prolonged the Great Depression" - claims that are demonstrably false. As Census data shows, the pre-WWII New Deal spending and regulatory agenda resulted both in robust GDP growth rates and the single biggest decline in the unemployment rate in American history. Unbelievably, conservative think tanks have resorted to quite literally lying about government data, claiming, as the Heritage Foundation has, that the "New Deal never drove unemployment below 20 percent." As you can see from the Census Bureau's verifiable data from 1936 and 1937, that claim is a patent lie - and it's great that Obama and his economic team seems to understand that.

Sirota also points out how raising taxes does not hurt productivity or GDP growth, according to, you know, research rather than rhetoric, and according to a Republican's analysis, GDP growth is larger from infrastructure building than from tax cuts. Of course, I myself could give a shit about GDP growth, for nine reasons from Sunday, but once again the work/blog balance calls out, and work, I must go to her.

But before I go, I got on to all of this by reading this article on The Root about the racism that barred the New Deal from helping Blacks anything remotely near as much as it helped Whites, the need for African-Americans today to vocally and forcefully act and support the stimulus, and its spending in the "blackest" states, like Louisiana and Mississippi, whose governors have threatened not to spend stimulus money sent to the state to provide aid to the unemployed and other programs to help the economically disadvantaged, despite the fact that "in two of the blackest states, both with governors threatening to reject the aid, Mississippi and Louisiana, the rate [of unemployment] is three times that of whites". So yeah, go read Michael Dawson's article, too.

So here are your talking points/marching orders/background information sources to go out there and fight the conservative unreality-based-community, because seriously, yo, this shit about the New Deal prolonging the Great Depression -- pending some SERIOUSLY stronger and more mainstream analyses -- is getting on my last mother-lovin' nerve.

Interesting and hopeful

An interesting and hopeful post by Hofstra political scientist David Michael Green here (h/t Counterpunch) on how the most significant achievements of a successful Obama presidency could potentially not be substantive policy change (though that would certainly be one element), but rather substantive changes in US's political culture to be intolerant of rampant military spending, empire, foreign adventurism, antipathy towards all things government and embracing of all things market, flippant standards for presidency like "who you might want to have a beer with" and admiring presidents who "decide from the guy", making big progress in healing the weeping wound that is US race relations, and more.

It seems wildly hopeful and vaguely unlikely to me, but I don't think Green is arguing it will all come true even if Obama's successful, but rather that one or more of these are possible, if not likely outcomes of a successful presidency. (I really only skimmed his article, but I think he's defining successful as essentially "popular" (well-liked) by the end of his term, re-elected, and effective enough to lead us in a direction of real recovery of jobs; he explicitly says that Obama's policies may end up being liberal or centrist, but that the real important long-term effects, the real hallmarks of the Obama age, could be changes in attitudes of the American electorate. I guess I posted this because I agree that these are possibilities, they would be incredibly important breakthroughs, and I see them as rather more likely than substantive progressive policy change from Obama, though if we get universal health care, I will definitely give it up for the big "O". Though if we get single-payer health care, I will give him mad props, big ups, and eat my hat. With some hot sauce perhaps. But I would eat it gladly.)

Lobbyists, Obama, Gender politics, and Blue Penis

"Full of country goodness and green pea-ness."
--"Orson Welles", on Fox's The Critic

Great, if short post here on The American Prospect (h/t to Matthew Yglesias) on the -gasp- full blueal penis of Dr. Manhattan in the new movie, The Watchmen. (Which is getting consistent "mehs" it seems, somewhat disappointing to this comic book fan, but it was directed by the godforsaken director of 300, for god's sake.) In the post, Phoebe Connely does a brilliant job quickly summing up the double standards of today's gender politics, where female nudity is a matter of course, but some consistent Quantum Guy Junk warrants mentioning by every reviewer everywhere, apparently. It reminds of hearing of people complaining about Brokeback Mountain (which I still haven't seen, sadly) and "too much gay sex" when, from what I understand, there was more and more explicit straight sex. Apparently, it's always "too much" when it's not targeted towards your team, so to speak.

There's a lot to unpack there (heh... package), but I really don't feel like it, so discuss amongst yourselves: Dr. Manhattan's full frontal nudity was neither full nor frontal nor nudity: Discuss.

In other news, Matthew Yglesias makes a compelling argument that Obama's "no lobbyist on staff" policy does more harm than good, because

well-qualified individuals who registered as lobbyists while working for progressive non-profits find themselves shut out of jobs, and the administration finds itself understaffed.

The problem here has always been that the lobbyist/non-lobbyist distinction doesn’t track any meaningful goals. Goldman Sachs’ lawyer, for example, is not a lobbyist, and therefore not banned from office. A “lobbyist” is just someone who talks to members of congress about legislation. You can be a corrupt special interest and not be a lobbyist, and you can be a lobbyist who only works for good causes.

But dumb as the pledge was, it’s dumber still to stick with it. Flip-flopping will look bad, but nobody will care in 2012 about an old flip-flop. By contrast, lots of people will care by 2012 if we’re in the midst of a prolonged depression...

I'm loathe to agree that lobbyists aren't inherently bad, but that's because I think of lobbyists as inherently being for private interests. And I don't suppose he could just ban all lobbyists for private interests? Of course what's worse is that Obama made exceptions for this at first (and apparently every Democrat he has ever known has freaking tax problems) but, as far as I know, is holding to it now, despite the problems outlined by Yglesias. But I haven't been closely following the news recently; maybe I'm wrong? (Except: D'oh.)

-J

(postscript: even this seemingly insightful review equates Watchmen's director's missteps in screen translation with not properly dressing Big Blue; I don't know that a codpiece really represents the artistic problems of the film, but that may just be me -- and that I haven't seen the film)

Yikes! C'mon, Obama, I mean, seriously.

While I'm quickly tiring of the meme of the tone, "How could he?" in reference to various things the O-Administration has done with varying degrees of regressiveness, nefariousness, opacity, or incompetence -- simply because I think it was silly to expect him to be that different in the first place, and it is simultaneously too early to be decisively disappointed but not at all too early to push him with activism and indignation. "How could he?" is more shocked woah-is-me portrayals of personal betrayal, which I guess I share sometimes, but I really never thought O was more than, as J-Mom has said, "Perhaps the best you can get in terms of a mainstream politician" which means to me "Trust him as far as you can throw him... and then verify how far you've thrown him." A sense of personal betrayal, while noble in politics in that it means you felt a personal connection and promise form someone, also seems rather naive to me, and in any case, it's not the same as activism (though it can motivate action, so I shouldn't be so down on it.)

Anyway, point is, according to this story (which I must admit I somewhat trust but have not verified from other stories),

Alaska prosecutors do not dispute that advanced DNA testing could prove Osborne's innocence beyond any doubt. But for nearly a decade, they've refused to allow him to do this testing.
To my great disappointment, recent news reports indicate that the Obama Justice Department has decided not to reverse the Bush administration's decision to weigh in on Alaska's side in the case, District Attorney's Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne. As has been said many times, the Justice Department's mission is to do justice. It is not to seek a conviction—or to uphold one—at all costs.

Former FBI Director William Sessions continues in his Slate article, that

Alaska's primary argument is that testing is unnecessary because non-DNA evidence demonstrates Osborne's likely guilt... Alaska contends that evidence of innocence does not, by itself, matter once a person has been convicted, or if the trial was free of constitutional and other defects. That goes too far in elevating the principle of finality over basic justice.

Certainly this doesn't seem like the side O's Justice Dept. should be on. Am I wrong? Is Sessions wrong? Is this just a brain fart on the Administration's part? Is Darth Vader Osborne's father? Please, J-fans, let me know.

El primero presidente negro-indígeno de América del Norte?

Interesting piece forwarded by J-friend SY, here, about Mexico's first black president (you know, the one before their second black president, Juan Alvarez). After some digging (so you don't have to!), the main advocate of recognizing Vincente Guerrero the first black Mexican president (and Juan Alvarez the second) is Ted Vincent, apparently a former historian at UC Berkeley. He is apparently of sufficient scholarship and repute that his books have been published by both HarperCollins (a popular publisher) and University Press of Florida (the joint university press of the Florida university system, seemingly no slouch). I researched his "repute" because recognizing these two as black presidents seems to be something primarily championed by himself, and various independent outlets (like the Berkeley Daily Planet) that have reprinted his work. There's no indication that his analyses are incorrect, and indeed, his analysis has an explanation for why we've not heard this before in this manner:

[The Mexican] congress had made it near impossible to organize against racial injustice through their passage of Law No. 310 that, though ostensibly in the spirit of equality, prohibited mention of anyone’s race in any public document or in the records of the parish church. One consequence of this law has been that knowledge of the racial attitude of the elite toward Guerrero’s African roots are relegated to private letters and anonymous pamphlets against “the black,” and many a modern history identifies him merely as of “peasant”or “laboring-class” background.

I find all this interesting, because Vincent's piece is one of those that, like works from Chomsky and Zinn (for me, at least), seem to make history make much more sense, they put what I've already learned in a context that seems so much more internally consistent rather than a disjointed collection of facts, and are sufficiently challenging to the ideas of US centrality and supremacy that it makes sense that they're expunged from our history lessons as a matter of course, with no doubt reasonable-sounding protestations of their ancillary importance. While Mexico is certainly no racial haven, the greater degree of intermarriage/intermixing in their population over the years makes them having had a black president seem like a logical probability (according to Vincent, they've actually had 3 presidents with strong African heritage), and Guerrero's actions and abolition of slavery (and the popular support keeping this abolition in place even after Guerrero's execution and rescinding of many of his reforms) make the secession of Texas from Mexico make all the more sense. (Remember, Texas threatened war on the US if the US didn't make them part of the US. That's gumption. And by gumption, I mean... Texas, ho boy, Texas.)

So anyway, in the waning days of Black History Month, which I believe I usually do SOMETHING for on the J Continuum, read Vincent's article, and if the spirit moves you, also read about Paul Robeson, why don't you, cuz from what good J-friend KC and I can tell, he appears to have been one of the best people ever, and we don't hear SHIT about him. (You know, spoke 25 languages, third African American ever accepted at Rutgers, first accepted to Columbia Law School, I think, lettered in like 7 college sports*, black actor who broke the color line and was adored by many white fans before his radical politics came about, helped striking Detroit autoworkers get better pay AND helped black autoworkers get closer to pay parity, told the House Committee on Un-American Activities to go take a flying fuck at itself, not in so many words, etc. etc. I mean, 16,000 people or so tried to attend an event for his 46th birthday -- his 46th! Not even a milestone birthday. So go, seek, Google. And while you're at it, read about James Baldwin in last year's J-entry for Black History Month.

--J

*He actually lettered in 15 varsity sports, apparently. In case you were wondering, J really would like to name his future son Robeson, should he ever have a son. Though there's some wiggle room, this is a potential deal breaker should the future J-significant other disagree on this point.

Viejito, pero bueno

A missive from Cuban ex-president Fidel Castro, from almost one year ago, hardly of the character we've been led to believe in:

(Disponible también aqui: http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2008/02/19/nacional/artic10.html)

Subject: Message from the Commander in Chief


Message from the Commander in Chief

Dear compatriots:

Last Friday, February 15, I promised you that in my next reflection I would deal with an issue of interest to many compatriots. Thus, this now is rather a message.

The moment has come to nominate and elect the State Council, its President, its Vice-Presidents and Secretary.

For many years I have occupied the honorable position of President. On February 15, 1976 the Socialist Constitution was approved with the free, direct and secret vote of over 95% of the people with the right to cast a vote. The first National Assembly was established on December 2nd that same year; this elected the State Council and its presidency. Before that, I had been a Prime Minister for almost 18 years. I always had the necessary prerogatives to carry forward the revolutionary work with the support of the overwhelming majority of the people.

There were those overseas who, aware of my critical health condition, thought that my provisional resignation, on July 31, 2006, to the position of President of the State Council, which I left to First Vice-President Raul Castro Ruz, was final. But Raul, who is also minister of the Armed Forces on account of his own personal merits, and the other comrades of the Party and State leadership were unwilling to consider me out of public life despite my unstable health condition.

It was an uncomfortable situation for me vis-à-vis an adversary which had done everything possible to get rid of me, and I felt reluctant to comply.

Later, in my necessary retreat, I was able to recover the full command of my mind as well as the possibility for much reading and meditation. I had enough physical strength to write for many hours, which I shared with the corresponding rehabilitation and recovery programs. Basic common sense indicated that such activity was within my reach. On the other hand, when referring to my health I was extremely careful to avoid raising expectations since I felt that an adverse ending would bring traumatic news to our people in the midst of the battle. Thus, my first duty was to prepare our people both politically and psychologically for my absence after so many years of struggle. I kept saying that my recovery “was not without risks.”

My wishes have always been to discharge my duties to my last breath. That’s all I can offer.

To my dearest compatriots, who have recently honored me so much by electing me a member of the Parliament where so many agreements should be adopted of utmost importance to the destiny of our Revolution, I am saying that I will neither aspire to nor accept, I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief.

In short letters addressed to Randy Alonso, Director of the Round Table National TV Program, --letters which at my request were made public-- I discreetly introduced elements of this message I am writing today, when not even the addressee of such letters was aware of my intention. I trusted Randy, whom I knew very well from his days as a student of Journalism. In those days I met almost on a weekly basis with the main representatives of the University students from the provinces at the library of the large house in Kohly where they lived. Today, the entire country is an immense University.

Following are some paragraphs chosen from the letter addressed to Randy on December 17, 2007:

“I strongly believe that the answers to the current problems facing Cuban society, which has, as an average, a twelfth grade of education, almost a million university graduates, and a real possibility for all its citizens to become educated without their being in any way discriminated against, require more variables for each concrete problem than those contained in a chess game. We cannot ignore one single detail; this is not an easy path to take, if the intelligence of a human being in a revolutionary society is to prevail over instinct.

“My elemental duty is not to cling to positions, much less to stand in the way of younger persons, but rather to contribute my own experience and ideas whose modest value comes from the exceptional era that I had the privilege of living in.

“Like Niemeyer, I believe that one has to be consistent right up to the end.”
Letter from January 8, 2008:

“…I am a firm supporter of the united vote (a principle that preserves the unknown merits), which allowed us to avoid the tendency to copy what came to us from countries of the former socialist bloc, including the portrait of the one candidate, as singular as his solidarity towards Cuba. I deeply respect that first attempt at building socialism, thanks to which we were able to continue along the path we had chosen.”

And I reiterated in that letter that “…I never forget that ‘all of the world’s glory fits in a kernel of corn.”

Therefore, it would be a betrayal to my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer. This I say devoid of all drama.

Fortunately, our Revolution can still count on cadres from the old guard and others who were very young in the early stages of the process. Some were very young, almost children, when they joined the fight on the mountains and later they have given glory to the country with their heroic performance and their internationalist missions. They have the authority and the experience to guarantee the replacement. There is also the intermediate generation which learned together with us the basics of the complex and almost unattainable art of organizing and leading a revolution.

The path will always be difficult and require from everyone’s intelligent effort. I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable. The principle of being as prudent in success as steady in adversity cannot be forgotten. The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong; however, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century.

This is not my farewell to you. My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas. I shall continue to write under the heading of ‘Reflections by comrade Fidel.’ It will be just another weapon you can count on. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I shall be careful.

Thanks.


Fidel Castro Ruz
February 18, 2008
5:30 p.m.

Obama DNI pick: Try not to leak on our torturers...

Nice article here by Ray McGovern on Consortium News, an indie news website founded journalist Robert Parry, "one of the reporters who helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal for the Associated Press in the mid-1980s."

McGovern speaks of how Obama nominees for CIA Director (Leon Panetta) and Director of National Intelligence (DNI; Dennis Blair) bend over backwards to accomadate Republican Senators, even to the point of eliding the truth and allowing several prevailing lies to continue ("everyone in the world thought there were WMDs in Iraq", for one), which was disproven by a report in the Senate itself, and now they seem more eager to prosecute potential leakers than torturers:

It is a measure of Washington that there is a bipartisan consensus on the need to prosecute leakers to set an example for others, but not to prosecute torturers.

[sigh] Oi vei.

Colbert's pithy defense of Affirmative Action (kinda)

Watching Colbert Report tonight, he was just discussing the recently-passed Lilly Ledbetter act. This act essentially provides for a return to the status quo in Equal Opportunity Employment and discrimination cases, where when an employee feels they may have been discriminated against, the statue of limitations on an anti-discrimination case starts from the moment of the last discriminatory act -- which in the case of pay inequality, would now be the last received paycheck. This is opposed to (and overturns) the Roberts' Supreme Court judgment finding that the statue of limitations begins at the *first* act of discrimination, i.e. the "first" discriminatory paycheck. (Oddly, supporters of the court's decision argued that this would reduce frivolous lawsuits -- whereas it seems this would have provided perverse incentive to sue ASAP in any POSSIBLE chance of discrimination, the all-feared frivolous lawsuits that Republicans are always tilting against.)

In any case, Colbert pointed out that because provides a corrective to potential discrimination against women, women therefore stood to gain more from it than men -- and it is therefore sexist! This is, of course, exactly the same theory apparently behind anti-Affirmative Action calls of discrimination/reverse discrimination, which I tend to think of as self-serving bunk or crazy-eyed delusion.

I'm illin' (in the literal sense) and gotta get to bed, so this is a link-free post, and I'm'a headin' off now. But remind me to tell y'all the anecdote from my Private Sector days about "discrimination" for those who have been discriminated against.

Touchdown!!!!!

Big gay touchdown that is. And by touchdown, I mean Prime Minister. And by big, I mean Icelandic. And by gay, I mean gay.

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir has, apparently, become the world's first openly gay head of government.*

Yay! It's a year -- um, or at least, a year-long period going back to last November -- of firsts.




*For pure confusionary fun, try to distinguish head of government and head of state. I keep reading the wiki entries, and the distinction keeps falling out of my head.

Good reads

For those interested in racial politics in the US, I highly recommend spending some time browsing Slate spin-off "The Root". I read a bunch of good articles in short order, even though I disagreed with most of them in part. (Which is natural, I'm just being pedantically clear.) But their analyses are, from my point of view, succinct, eloquent, relatively comprehensive in terms of at least touching on the major elements of the story in question, and insightful in a way that makes what may be opaque about African American perspective clear.

So. Read them. Now. Especially D. (Just cuz she's expressed interest in this area and these seem like better than average further primers.)

Addressing and Undressing the Race Problem, Charlayne Hunter-Gaul

A Nash'nul Conversashun 'Bout Race? O-Tay, Jack "Ironically Named" White

The GOP's Next (Black) Idea?, Casey Lartigue

Grand White Party, Dayo Olopade (and the subtitle here bears repeating, perhaps: "Can the Republicans get down with the brown?"

I read these in reverse order that you see here, which I only mention because they seemed especially lucid in that order, but that might be just me.

I recommend browsing around the rest of the Root: I don't like all of their articles, but their average is pretty high quality -- slightly higher than Slate probably. Indeed, "The Root" probably looks something like the print version of what I think NPR's News & Notes should be like (instead of being like a NPR's "All Things Considered" -- or worse yet, like a CNN news/talk show -- with black people. The range of views on N&N is approximately the same as on ATC, and the analyses seem to me to be often be as facile; what's the use of having African American voices if they sound (in types and range of questions) pretty much like Noah Adams and Linda Werthheimer and Tom Ashbrook talking?) I wrote in comments that "mainstream" Slate should have The Root writers and XX Factor Fraysters write the actual articles -- both seem to have better analyses than many of Slate's (and certainly NPR) regulars. (I'm looking at you, David Plotz on the Gabfest.)

Walk like a New Dealer

(offensive version of this title: Walk like FDR)

Another, wait for it... Slate article, this time about Obama's Economic Stimulus Package. According to the figures from the Congressional Budget Office (as I've seen reported at least), only half of the hundreds of billions to be spent will be spent in the next two years; in the article Tim Noah (J-fave) points out that only one tenth of it will be spent during the current fiscal year (of which over half is still left). And supposedly, about one eighth will go to corporate goodies that do nothing for the economy (much less the Johanna the Average Person). (From Noah: "$212 billion [of the $816 billion plan] will be given out as tax cuts (of which close to half are corporate goodies of dubious value to economic recovery).)

Noah compares this to FDR's administration, and notes that he created in months the number of jobs Obama proposes to create in years, by directly contracting people in Public Works rather than through 3rd party (private) contracts -- that is, he didn't outsource, as Obama plans to. I'm sure there are good arguments for outsourcing* -- or at least politically rational ones -- but Noah's conclusion seems to be that effectiveness is not one of these arguments (with which I'd tend to agree). Noah observes that the program listed as an example of why the government must go slowly and carefully here is a program loaning money to auto companies for energy efficient vehicles, of which no money has been spent; Noah hypothesizes this is an example of why this is not the time to privately subcontract the work of creating jobs.

Considering the Republican/Conservative/Libertarian orthodoxy that FDR a) only incidentally helped end the recession, b) FDR didn't really affect the Depression, or c) FDR prolonged the Depression through his programs that didn't work such as Public Works representing counterproductive government intervention, I can't imagine, even in these more pro-government-intervention times that it would be terribly politically feasible for Obama to directly contract a bunch of Americans for Public Works projects as Employees of the United States Government. I don't even really blame him, politically. But it rather seems like "business as usual" in that, if one agrees with the Slate analysis or the proposition that FDR helped end the Depression, it presents "business as usual" and "non-change that we cannot believe in" to settle for an approach that will be inefficient and ineffective because an effective solution is a politically treacherous one.
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* Of no import whatsoever, I note here that from my understanding, "terceirização" is the Brazilian Portuguese term for outsourcing/subcontracting. (Lit. "thirdization")

If I had world enough and time...

...my impulse to back-blog and catch up on any number of useful blog topics would be divine.

Also, I don't and so it's not.

So rather than weighing in on the weighty hot topics of the moment, let me weigh in on one weighty oft-hot topic that slips in and out of primary focus in the American mind: health care.

In brief, a good article at Slate argues that, gee, this is another case where market competition can drive extremely bad results without careful, careful planning. The point the authors make in this article is that, without restraint and (government) involvement, the health care industry would naturally and has become a competition not for best health outcomes, but for most lucrative patients -- those illnesses with the highest profit margin. So, apparently, cancer is a winner, even though diabetes may kill you just as dead, it's a B-list malady. And commonplace emergency room problems? Hypertension? General medicine? Please -- Kathy Griffin don't have nothing on them.

"The market" as the Fourth member of the Holy Christian Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Invisible Hand) seems to be fading fast... hopefully, it will be weak enough soon that, as an ideology, we can drive a stake through its heart.

As my graduate advisor said a class he teaches each year, (to paraphrase) "Markets exist and are good at certain things. It is pure faith, an ideology, to say that it is good at all things and always yields the correct answers -- treating it as an omniscient and omnipotent force is no different than religion, and is not a scientific approach."

Raj Patel's Apology

Raj Patel "apologizes" to Obama for a number of presumptuous assumptions about what "change" meant.

A brilliant ironic letter, much in keeping with how I feel about it all.

Happy New Year to All!!!!!

Your... Bible is a. Lie...

The title of this post is brought to you in ShatnerVision (tm).

There are many things to be said about Obama's choice of Rick Warren to provoke, er, invoke, er, deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Sarah Posner says some of them in the Nation:

There was no doubt that Obama, like every president before him, would pick a Christian minister to perform this sacred duty. But Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics. Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And. The hits. Just keep on! Coming!

J-Mom (aka J-Mom, PhD aka Dr. J-Mom aka Prof. J-Mom) had this excellent hypothesis: since Obama is enjoined from saying too much about the Blagojevich scandal (hey-oh! did I spell that right on my first try?) and people keep trying to hang it around O's neck somehow, despite much proof of anything substantive to hang, he used his political savvy and determined that starting a tempest in a teapot was a wise way to go. Something to distract people from a circumstance beyond his control about which he can do little, by giving them something else to get outraged at. Now, to be sure, I am among the camp that thinks his choice of Warren is substantively bad and an affront to gays and those who support equal rights for humans of all flavors regardless of what other consenting adult they wish to marry, but strategically, it is a tempest in a teapot. That is, it sends a signal that is worrying, but if it really were a "wag the dog" type move, it would be in the knowledge that while this may cause discomfort, he can win back those he loses on the Left through actual substantive action later on. Which is absolutely true -- this is affronting, but if he follows with actively promoting gay rights when his administration actually starts, well, all wouldn't be forgiven, but enough would be that this would be a wise wager on his part.

I don't know that J-Mom, Phd is correct, but I don't know that she's wrong, either. It's a fascinating hypothesis, and one practically unresolvable barring a personal admission from P-E B. H. O.