43 Years Ago Today

Sean Hannity is a Moron

But we knew that already.

25 Years Ago Today

The Challenger Tragedy



I remember watching this in my living room with my girlfriend at the time. It was a sunny day, a day or two after a blizzard in New York City. We just sat and watched in silence.

My Manifesto

POSTED BY JHW22

I am admittedly NOT a presidential scholar. Aside from not being alive longer than the last six presidents’ terms, I have only become a serious observer of politics in the last five years. In that time I have become a mom, volunteered for a number of organizations reaching across issues I knew little about prior to my assistance, and tried to just keep up with the topics of the day. In NO WAY could I add to my list of priorities the self-education of every presidency prior to my birth, nor the presidencies of my infancy, adolescence and teenage years at times in my life when that type of subject was nowhere near important. So, with that said, I am not able to go toe to toe with anyone on what FDR, Truman, Carter or Reagan did on any given maneuver or policy fight.

But what I can say is this: I would bet that most people who make comparisons to Obama and any other President aren’t as knowledgeable on the analytics as they may like to sound. It is easy to say, “Obama needs to go all FDR on the Republicans” because it sounds good and you could probably find hundreds of blog posts, articles and Daily Kos diaries stating the same idea. But how many of the people who wrote those actually studied FDR and truly understand the nuances of his deal-making, his compromises, his obstacles and his political ammunition? How many people who make such easy statements actually have the capacity to compare with such certainty as to summarize the current President as a failure based on the FDR metrics? How many of those people are able to take scenario A of FDR and properly compare it to scenario A of Obama and not only zero in on the exact similarities but also be able to make enough matches with such similarities as to be able to make a complete judgment that the scenarios are so exact that the only outcome must be that Obama should take every identical step FDR took?

Even people who have been alive and aware during previous administrations don’t know any more of the inner-workings and logistical maneuverings that actually took place. Americans seem to think we know everything when actually, we don’t know shit. Because we read it somewhere does not make the information complete. We also tend to think that if we know A through G, then obviously the next letter is H. Well, that’s true of the alphabet but not politics.

I will concede that some of the authors of the “Obama should be FDR” pieces do know a lot about FDR. I am sure there are many who have read enough biographies and histories to have a fair handle on the situation. However, any one of them who then tries to convince me that the scenarios of each president are equal may have read history but are most definitely avoiding the reality that there is no possible way that any two scenarios faced by any two presidents can be exactly the same. You CAN NOT take a policy discussion or decision without seeing a million details that do not match history. Just as I could not figure out your ATM pin number without a multitude of potential combinations, far more possible mixtures of personalities, opposition, coordination, dollar amounts, concessions, conflicts, time-lines, external impacts, internal consequences, etc, etc, etc, mean that NO COMPARISON can be made that should or could form any judgment on the current president.

(By the way, you can substitute FDR for Truman or Carter or Reagan or Lincoln.)

Now, I am called naïve, a bot, a whatever Paul Krugman or Glenn Greenwald want to call me, but frankly, I find the naiveté in any person who thinks you can narrow an opinion of the current president down to a overwhelming simplistic and far-reaching avoidance of reality that the past is not the present. We can LOOK to the past for guidance but we can’t pretend that the past can be duplicated. In comparing Obama to any previous president is beyond simplistic and far-reaching, it is a stubborn avoidance of the frustration that HE isn’t the problem. Rather than deal with the reality of the actual problems we face, it’s far easier to say he isn’t being FDR enough. We may as well say he isn’t Atticus Finch enough. Because, although Atticus is a fictional character, the demand that Obama act exactly like another person in another time with different problems, different players, different options, is as fictionally-based as wishing he were someone who never existed. Although, technically, there was a real person Harper Lee based Atticus on, but you get my point.

SO, I do not accept any comparisons or evaluations of Obama based on prior presidents. If that’s all you’ve got, and if I were a professor, I’d send you back to rewrite your entire thesis and tell you to avoid the “Handmaid’s Tale”/”1983”/”Animal Farm” aspect of your analysis and give me your actual understanding of the options he actually faces, with the tools he actually possesses, against the challenges he actually has to overcome TODAY. THEN tell me, step-by-step and in non-black and white ways what he could have done and what he can do that would have made any other choices valid and more successful than he has been.

Let’s take the public option. Tell me how Barack Obama (and NOT FDR) could have succeeded with that. Base it on what he said and not what anonymous reports stated. Before making assumptions of what was said in back room meetings, before assuming reports are based in pure fact and no spin, look at the situation he was presented with. Consider the possibility he was on the phone every hour, talking with members of Congress (because according to the PBS documentary on the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, Obama was, in fact, on the phone more times than the media reported).

Next, consider the possibility that the media killed the public option. The American public was supportive early on. What happened? Things like “death panels” and “kill the bill” became the media focus. The media called the public option DOA long before Obama conceded, publicly at least, that it wasn’t going to survive. The very organizations who determine whether Obama’s message gets out to the American people pre-wrote history. They called it dead before anyone could actually make a dent in negotiations. In my honest opinion, that empowered the right by suggesting the possibility and by distracting the left from the discussion. The right pounced on the left’s key issue and the left freaked out over Obama. No one was left to fight the right and the lies were able to take hold in the American public.

Obama stayed on message but a certain faction of the left was so damn frazzled that we started running after our own quarterback and caused a fumble that was scooped up by the opposition who then ran to within field goal range. We won the game but barely. We would have creamed them had we protected the quarterback. But we lost focus of our priorities. Today, the law we have is helping me personally.

If everyone can pretend that they know what FDR would have done, then I suggest that people stop and consider that we would have had a public option today if the media had reported facts as opposed to speculation. We would have had a public option had Democrats held strong together and played the plays as planned rather than forgetting how to play altogether.

But would’ve, could’ve, should’ve aren’t relevant. I am saving money. My son is covered despite a pre-existing condition. My life is better because of what DID take place.

Now, without going issue by issue or point by point through the last two years, let me say this and ask that you apply it to all you have assumed, decided, declared:

What do you KNOW? Do you easily accept every report you read? Does any part ever sound just not right? Do you have questions that the report didn’t raise? And when you have that feeling, when you still have questions, what do you do with it? When you read another source that says the same thing, so you then say, “Aha, it must be true”? If you’ll recall, I have said that Republicans tend to think that if 100 websites say “bibbity bobbity boo in Kalamazoo” then it must be as written. It never occurs to them that all 100 sites using the phrase word-for-word means someone copied and pasted. 99 people copied the words of 1 person but the idea is still that first person’s. The other 99 stopped short of analysis and just repeated. THAT is not confirmation. It’s repetition. The Democrats don’t do that specifically. We don’t really copy and paste entire articles and try to pass that off as Woodward-style fact-checking. We’re too proud of our own writing abilities that we at least re-write what we read.

Democrats take an idea and revise, add their own flourishes, put their own voice to it and state it is absolute fact whether or not they ever put a second of their articulate genius toward actually finding out if that initial idea were true, unbiased or simply relevant. No, if an idea sounds kick-ass, Democrats rush out to tell the same idea in their own way without bothering to come up with an idea on their own. Inevitably, the writers who love to share other people’s ideas in their own words, accidentally slip up and start using the same words or phrases created by the first writer to summarize the situation. Presently the words are “cave” and “fight” although no one can truly articulate what either means to them. It’s really just a feeling. I remember the first time I saw “cave” used in regards to Obama and the Bush tax cuts. Now it is THE word used by all Democrats who don’t want him to but a cent or a day – even though they may not even know why a certain dollar amount is so sacred.

No one wants him to “cave” yet I’ve seen countless times where people have said they would be OK if the amount were raised to another number. How can we demand he not cave and then be willing to compromise on the number? It’s because the idea of him not caving sounds good but no one has really defined that meaning for themselves, let alone the masses of people who read that and revise that. The word has become overused by people who imprinted on it without analyzing the meaning. The same people want Obama to “draw a line in the sand” yet they really have no clue what or where the line should be, they are just certain that a line MUST be drawn. They are certain that they know a line is needed. To me, the demand is hollow without any true understanding of what the magic line should be.

Democrats don’t think beyond black and white any more than the Republicans do. For example, the federal pay freeze. The accepted assumption is that Obama froze federal employee pay to give, without a “fight”, some phantom concession to the Republicans. I have not seen, perhaps it is out there but I’ve missed it, the mention that over the last several months as the private sector has created jobs, the government has laid people off. Yes, we have had consistent job LOSSES in the government sector. To me, a pay freeze is the alternative to further layoffs of federal employees. And to me, it is a legitimate alternative. But the quick assumption was that Obama “caved”. Now, Obama did not give the reason I see in his speech. He didn’t say it’s to save federal employees from loosing their jobs. But right now we need him emphasizing job creation and not massive losses. He had to put a stop to the bleeding but Democrats won’t see that because that isn’t the message being fed. And in this case, although I wish he’d put that message out there, I can see why he won’t. But few Democrats will search beyond the blogs and articles and cable tv to find the meaning that makes sense.

In summary, I COULD go further point by point through the last two years and “prove” why Obama has stayed as true to his promises as the best presidents of our history. I could remind everyone that he has always said he is here to work with all, for all. I could point out the challenges he faces of Fox News and right-wing blogs and racism and corporate money and the Supreme Court, and on and on. But none of that is relevant to my overall point.

The overall point is that Americans stopped thinking for themselves. Today Obama was giving a speech on the economy. MSNBC cut away. CNN either cut away or never aired it. CSPAN wasn’t airing it. But www.whitehouse.gov was live-streaming it. And yet people say Obama doesn’t talk about the economy. This is one of a hundred speeches I have watched or listened to him give. He talks about the economy every day. Someone from his administration is talking about the economy every day. So why do people think he isn’t? It’s because the media controls the message and because Americans are too lazy to seek out the information. Americans assume that if the media isn’t bringing the information to them, it just must not exist. And when the media speaks, we parrot.

And then we blame the president for what we don’t hear or what we do hear.

So, perhaps I should have been clearer in earlier posts. Perhaps I haven’t put the correct message out there. Perhaps I am still failing. But I refuse to consider worthy a conversation with people who either live in a constant state of comparing two centuries, two presidents and two extremely complex realities who also rely on the very media we have all watched disintegrate over the last decade. Any Democrat who will pick and choose which articles must be true based on some in-grained cynicism or some need to justify their own desires to pretend as if they are all-knowing, are frankly, in my opinion, not a part of any solution. They may have access to, and more frequently use, real data and facts, but the spin they choose to place on the reality of today suggests to me they are as unproductive and obstructionist as Republicans.

What I look for in a true discussion is the lack of catch-phrases. If you use the buzzwords of the day, I can only assume you have either accepted others’ ideas without even applying your own verbiage. Or you have subconsciously adopted others’ thinking and therefore are going to be zombie-like in your debate. There is no getting through to the latter. So, I only want to discuss with people who have asked themselves how they formed their ideas, which sources they used, why those sources, and have they really sat and thought something through before taking a stand one way or another. If you are an expert on FDR and can tell me that 4 out of 5 scenarios of each debate Obama faces are 90% similar, then have at it. But if you’ve never actually studied the papers, letters, speeches, reports, etc. of FDR and can’t tell me with any certainty that 4 out of 5 scenarios of each debate are the same as what Obama faces now, then I don’t want to read the letters “F D R” in your response to me. (Again, you can substitute any previous president). Oh, and I should add, that when I hear journalists I actually respect say things like “Truman never polled the military” and then a month later say “when Truman polled the military” I call bullshit. And when I see other people parrot one or both of those talking points, even talking points from journalists I respect, I also call bullshit. When it comes to the DADT survey, it was NEVER about whether to repeal or not; the survey was to help the military effectively plan the repeal through effective policies and education. That is something we should honor – a prepared military. Instead, the media pre-misconstrued the report until they saw the results and have since done a 180 on the way they report on it. Thus, I see average Democrats doing the same. And that is one example where I say, unequivocally, that I have watched the media messaging seep into the subconscious of Democrats.

So, if you use any word of the day, convince me, in your own words, that you have thought through the situation on all levels. Show me devil’s advocate thinking and maybe then we can get somewhere. But if you tell me you think black simply because the media says so or because Republicans say white, and you can’t even comprehend gray in your logic, then I don’t have time for you.

I have spent HOURS developing my opinions, my perspective, my understanding. In all of this I have concluded that the media is mostly a rapid-fire, beat the next guy, soap opera. And sadly, many Democrats, who I expect to be smarter, fall for the agenda, messaging, tone and mood set by those we shouldn’t be accepting with such enthusiasm. Yet, Democrats pick up their language, mood, tenor and assumptions for no reason I can comprehend.

Anyone who parrots the media is not worthy of another moment of my time. I have serious thinking to do and only want to participate with serious thinkers. I have a lot to learn and expect only those with integrity to teach me. If you aren’t that person, I implore you to try to be that person. Change how you get your information. Change how you process it. Change why you believe what you do. And finally, find your own damn voice in it all. You don’t have to write or speak eloquently, but know that what you think and say is your own and not some media-tainted creation.

Wake up and rub the newspaper ink off your face. We all know what the media has come to. So why do you let it be your guide?

47 Years Ago Today

The Zapruder film can be seen here.

While We're On The Subject

posted by Armadillo Joe

I'm working on a series of posts that expand upon my previous dissertation on the overlapping system failures we are currently experiencing as a nation, as a civilization and as a species. My next one will expound upon the concept of money and how our perversion of the basic concept has brought us to the illogical, disintegrating world we find ourselves in today.

But that's for a little later. For now, I've found two posts that sum up as succinctly as I have ever seen, exactly why left versus right in this country is not an even match.

I have this argument all the time with my squishy centrist friends. And those of you who think of yourselves as centrists, I mean you... with all due respect of course, but nevertheless squishy.

These squishy centrists (and their patron saint David F. Brooks) seem to view the American political spectrum as a fairly evenly balanced see-saw with a red team (the "R"s) and a blue team (the "D"s) each ideally working upon a level playing field with a set of agreed-upon rules (as with all sports - including the contact variety), acting in good faith as citizens to make for a better America for all Americans, merely with different views on how best to do that within the bounds of those agreed-upon rules; thus making the pursuit of some kind of balance between the two sides something of an ideal for the good of the nation, an ideal frequently thwarted by extremist ideologues on each side who are too far out on the fringe of the see-saw (and reinforced by their equally-matched and thoroughly mirror-image echo chambers) to participate in the Grand Balancing Act which the vast middle of American society craves. Thus when we on The Left take a side on an issue that seems to this squishy middle to be stereotypically "doctrinaire left" and thus paralyzing to this give-and-take, they feel justified in characterizing it as just another impediment (100% equally as bad and 100% one-to-one comparable to anything coming from The Right) to achieving that magical balance because a nation founded on compromise requires give-and-take from both sides to make progress.

I think that is as fair an assessment as I can give their viewpoint, free of snark and condescension. And Matthew Yglesias sums up why this is naive:

the 2006 and 2008 elections haven’t changed the structural imbalance between left and right in American politics.

[...] I would characterize this (imbalance) [...] like this: Fox is much more conservative than MSNBC is liberal, and it has a much larger audience. Conservative talk radio continues to dwarf anything that exists on the left. Business has a “privileged position” in America’s version of interest-group pluralism, and labor unions are weaker than ever. A large proportion of poor people are non-citizens who can’t vote, and those who can vote have not only less money but much less social and cultural capital and thus the political system is almost entirely unresponsive to their needs.

These aren’t “excuses” for bad behavior by elected officials, but they’re reasons that progressives don’t get what we want out of the political system.

And then, of course, driftglass knocks it out of the park as to the real causes:

Over in the Better Universe, people have multiple, distinctive ideologies that both compete and cooperate with each other (in business, this is called "cooptition") and from which they can form governing coalitions to solve problems.

Here, we have a Democratic Party that can be budged incrementally in the direction of rational and humane problem-solving as long the crisis is immediate and scary and then only as long as we Constantly Scream At Them and beat them on the soles of their feet. Even then, after they get our nickels and dimes and sweat and votes, we get 1/4 of a loaf, a lot of chin music, and the back of Rahm Emanuel's hand.

On the Right we have American Fascism, right out in the open, being energetically championed by people who are unhinged, despicable, impervious to reason and ridiculously well-funded.

Those are the choices: A Democratic Party which depends on us for everything they have, which is still shot through with decent, honorable, hard-working men and women, and which nonetheless still treats us like a smelly hobo to whom they occasionally feel obliged to toss a bone...and a Republican Party now wholly captive to outright psychotics and which sees us as internal enemies to be wiped out.

To me, the reasons for this are simple, and a certain Mr. Lincoln summed it up in the darkening days before the Civil War:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [...]

[...] what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.

Does that attitude seem familiar to any readers? Please, do read the whole speech. Our national discourse (and one party in particular) has been so thoroughly Dixie-fied, particularly since LBJ gave black people the vote in The South, that it could have been written last week.

Back soon...

And You May FInd Yourself...

posted by Armadillo Joe

*What follows is a rather lengthy post. It began as a rant about our fawning, house-broken media personalities (taking Taibbi on the Lara Logan/Rolling Stone flap as a jumping-off point), which quickly evolved into a long-form elucidation on the wide-spread break down of civilization we currently find ourselves living in. I will be returning to the many points of this post in the coming days, stretching them and expanding on various ideas I glossed over to get to my main point, which is, I think, to fasten your seatbelts and be ready for what's next. Thank you for reading and comments are always welcome.

Been thinking about the future a lot of late. A whole lot. So much to consider, it seems, in the face of catastrophic climate change, the never-ending gusher in The Gulf, the systematic dismantling of the very structures of governance by corporate and Old Money elites and the continued complicity of those we elected if not to thwart altogether at least to stymie them somewhat...

At times it seems like too much.

And I ask myself "How did we get here? How can we fix it? Is it even fixable?"

And time and again when confronted with these questions, I conclude that we can't fix things and likely won't. Some would accuse me of being pessimistic for saying something like that, of giving up the fight and letting the bad guys win, but I think sometimes letting the patient die is the only option, so that others may live. It's what makes any discussion of left/right or Democrat/Republican or liberal/conservative so bloody difficult: the old consensus definitions are breaking down and new ones are yet to emerge. I'd argue some (if not most) of that confusion is by design, though I don't think this is anything new to human history. The only part that makes it seem new is technology and the speed enabled by that technology. Sixty+ years ago, Orwell's vision of an eagerly violent ADD citizenry was scary pseudo science fiction. Today, the tea-bagging flash mobs of hate (h/t John Cole) that have emerged since the inauguration are proof that what he saw in the cynical manipulation of the German public was no mere aberration, an abomination brought about by the singular genius of a small group of evil men, but was a latent tendency in all of us, teased out by an unfortunate convergence of historical circumstances, some very bad luck and what Hanna Arendt called the "banality of evil."

Do I overstate my case? Not really. America's been torturing people openly, disappearing whomever "the government" labels an enemy combatant, sentencing people to indefinite detention without a trial, 'no-fly' lists restricting freedom of movement with no recourse to a fair hearing and 'free-speech zones' efficiently keeping those in power from ever having to hear dissatisfaction with the results of their policies, broadly spying and warrentlessly wire-tapping domestic targets, searching and seizing the property of anyone virtually guilty of pre-crime, brutally suppressing public dissent and equipping law enforcement with tortuous compliance weapons, all of this for almost a decade (longer, actually, since the War on Drugs laid the groundwork for the overt militarization of law enforcement we have suffered since the Cheney Regime) and all this criminality abetted by a pliant, cowed corporate media helping to pile onto anyone who raised a peep about any of it, dismissing them as unserious, dirty fucking hippies who hate America.

How else to evaluate what is happening right now in Arizona, and will soon happen in the various other copycat states in the coming months and years? How will that situation ever get any better, especially as America's bottomless appetite for illicit drugs finances the drug cartel's destabilization of the entire government of Mexico, and refugees flow across the border? To say nothing of the effects of climate change and overdevelopment on the American side of the border depleting the remaining water resources in the SouthWest and an open shooting war over water rights becoming ever more likely.

The early days of the next era of human civilization are upon us, folks, and the transition, like most transitions, will be violent and the causes misdiagnosed by very many different people until the overall shape and texture of the whole event becomes too obvious to deny or ignore. Even then, some will deny plain facts (we're still arguing about FDR and the Civil War, fercrissake). That it will take decades means many of our contemporaries will never understand the early stages of that to which they bore witness.

That sentence will require some explanation.

All of these various seemingly disconnected news stories are in fact one Very Big Story, which is that another widespread social, political and economic upheaval is upon us. And the ruling orders are well and truly scared of how all that will turn out for them, since the last three or four haven't ended very well for them. The last upheaval gave us two consecutive world wars and ended four centuries of Western European dominance of global affairs. What will this one bring about? Who can say, really? But an examination of what caused the last two or three dislocations and how they shaped subsequent events, how they indeed became the subsequent events themselves, is informative.

Measured across different time scales, ever since Western Civilization emerged from the chaos of the post-Roman Dark Ages, the different factors under-girding the stability of the international order (a stability created by a host of factors ranging from political alliances to shared ideology to trade policy to climate to technology to the underlying energy regimen to the various agreements among the myriad factions of the ruling classes) in any given era have all upended periodically. Often the wave periods of these oscillations (or factors or forces or movements) across time, as well as the geographic dispersion of them, are spread out enough that the whole system doesn't crash all at once. Sometimes, though, they are not spread out enough in time or space and the results are like a chain reaction, a contagion culminating in global catastrophe, and a new order emerges from the ashes of the old. Throughout the last 700 or 900 years, the stability of the existing order in any given locale has rarely lasted more than 50 or 75 years without some major disruption (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but never eternal -- even in China), so in very many ways we are overdue for an upheaval here in the West. World War 2 was a long time ago.

Friedrich Hegel had a name for these oscillating periods of stability and chaos throughout history, his "Hegelian Dialectic", and the components were thus: a thesis creates its own antithesis, they struggle and a new synthesis emerges which becomes the new thesis and hence another antithesis and so the cycle repeats.

And thus, in that new synthesis the seeds of its eventual collapse are sown. In America, our country was born of such a synthesis as the political cultures of the North and South compromised on slavery in order to forge a new nation, and an uneasy new thesis moved us forward. Four score and seven years later, the American Civil War was fought to again settle on another idealistic synthesis that died with the end of Reconstruction and was followed by the bloated, cynical consensus of Gilded Age capitalism, which was itself first exploded by the First World War, then sunk utterly by its own failures with the Great Depression.

Meanwhile in Europe, the American Revolution had touched off wave after destructive wave of revolutionary fervor (1789, the entirety of the Napoleonic Wars, 1848, 1870, 1914), the power of the old ruling order of inherited title (which had held Europe together for 800 years) continually eroded and cracked and never remade fully whole again throughout the 19th Century, until the tottering framework of aristocratic Europe was smashed and scorched away fully and forever in the cauldron of the First World War, an upheaval so vast and so violent that it eventually pulled in this country from across the Atlantic Ocean. The inter-war period was largely a global power vacuum filled by rising fascism, communism and the inertia of a disintegrating Pax Britannia, the lone Great Power to keep its crown and even then only as a figurehead, while the global economic order eventually imploded under its own ponderous weight, resulting in the Great Depression.

World War 2 represented a failure to forge a lasting synthesis in the wake of the previous disruption (WW1), resulting in even greater death and destruction. In the wake of that conflict, during the resulting Cold War, America and a constellation of "free" states appeared to stand off against the USSR and the client states in its gravitational field, purportedly in a global contest of ideologies, but really in a vast, world-wide resource war for petroleum, centering on two opposing theories of political organization. On this side of the Iron Curtain, the elites of Europe and America had two different approaches to the massive social and political dislocations of the previous two centuries. In Europe, the elites placated the masses with a generous welfare state and useful infrastructure, but bamboozled them with myriad political parties to dilute their voting power while giving the illusion of inclusion. In America, the elites dispersed the masses into suburbs and bought them off with material prosperity, then corralled the rest into decaying inner cities. When the resulting social friction could no longer be contained by the received two-party system, they co-opted whatever social unrest they could into their own pet political party (the GOP) by deflecting blame onto the victims of their policies (a process that continues to this day) and squeezed the jumbled remnants of the opposing party into resigned compliance, all the while spending the enormous economic dividends generated by petroleum technology to erect a sprawling national security state, a vast military-industrial complex and an almost monolithic corporate political ecology. Both parties were willing and eager participants in that program, from LBJ's "Guns and Butter" through to the Clinton-era military that W used to blow up the world, all the while cheered by a pliant corporate media.

It was during this time that our current understanding of left versus right was formed. And, as I said at the top of this post, it is precisely why we as a voting public can't have an intelligent discussion about the issues that now face us. The system is blowing itself apart at the seams now, right now, before our very eyes, and though we had an opportunity to head-off catastrophe a generation ago, the inertia of history too great, it seems, to steer ourselves a better course out of the long, dark shadows of our previous imperfect attempts at synthesis.

And so, once again, the signs that another such upheaval is upon us are all around, as the existing ruling classes tighten their grip on power: the extortion money paid by our government to stabilize the banking system, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to stabilize the petroleum supply (and provide the only remaining domestic economic stimulus), even the clamp-down on journalists on our own supposedly free soil in The Gulf region to prevent some de-stabilizing bad news from becoming more widely known about exactly how bad the calamity in The Gulf actually is -- all of them signs that those in power are desperate to maintain it.

Because money, which always functioned as an agreement to facilitate trade (and hence was always mostly imaginary) in service of the needs of actual human beings, has become so much more important in the form of the personal wealth of a privileged few than actual human beings who are suffering and dying for want of the things money can easily provide, that international monetary policy is built around enforcing wealth-protection, not facilitating resource distribution. This has been the case for decades.

Because the earth's resources -- most crucially petroleum -- are all running out while our global economy remains engineered around an antiquated model of an ever-increasing prosperity those resources will soon no longer be able to support.

Because climate change is real and accelerating and irreversible and hundreds of millions of people will be directly affected, soon and forever.

Because wide-spread political destabilization always results from income disparity and ecological destruction this great (they are related), it is contagious and our ruling elites are too myopically focused on their own arcane struggles to notice or care.

Because...

Because...

Because, well...

Oh fuck it. Let's listen to some rock-n-roll music:

yeah, some people had all this shit figured out a long time ago.

Re-emergence

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, Blog-O-Maniacs, been gone a while. Been busy, but the sched is easing up so I hope to resume posting here with some greater frequency. In the meantime, I've been exercising my re-awakening debate skills on some folks on a friend's page at Facebook.

I enjoy reading all the lefty blogs, but rather than join the "fuck, yeah!" tone of most comments sections I'm more and more drawn to engaging on Facebook because I have come to believe that, apart from our calls-to-arms phoning of Congress at key points, we aren't doing much to actually change minds out there. By focusing on each other, we're ignoring the millions who never meet a liberal in their daily lives, and only hear a steady stream of FOX and Limbaugh and Hannity. They never ever have their assumptions challenged. I increasingly think Facebook might be the only place to really do that, since most of us want to keep the family peace and don't engage when cranky Uncle Ray starts talkin' about the uppity niggers and them wimmin-folk having abortions for fun and sport.

But, on Facebook, we have a real audience and not just the person we're locking horns with, but all your common friends and family and all their friends and family. For many of the silent lurking readers, it might be the first time a lib-ruhl wasn't a burned-out 1960's era relic (a Grateful Dead-ender, if you will) or Alan Colmes. Smart, strong and engaged liberals who don't back down are a rarity throughout most of the country and our recent political history is a testament to the extent we've disengaged our fellow Americans, allowing FOX to fill the void. I urge you, all of you, to go out and give them an example and win their respect or, failing that, their silence.

As a re-introductory post, I thought I'd cross-post and get your reactions, to gauge how I did.

This is long, but worth it, I think.

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend - Can we just portray history? Dear God.

Texas Hearing Considers Deeper Conservative Stamp on Textbooks - NYTimes.com www.nytimes.com
The Texas school board held hearings on proposed changes to the state’s social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light.

Thu at 8:12am · Comment · Like · Share

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend
What a bleeped up mess. Feel free. Add some of this. I'm not a Reagan fan, but to not emphasize him in a curriculum is dumb. BUT to no longer use the term American "imperialism"? Seriously people? Or to talk about how the Civil War set up unrealistic expectations? Ah man, I have a raging headache now.
Thu at 8:18am

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Armadillo Joe
K, the only way these people can support their political agenda is to make up a glorious history chock-full of "facts" to support it. Since reality has a well-known liberal bias, they have to make up their own facts, just like authoritarians always have from the Nazis to the Soviets, and implant them in the unformed minds of the young. Its called indoctrination and its the only way the GOP can hope to have a coherent political party in the coming decades, by cultivating a whole generation of mis-educated nitwits.

Orwell said it best: "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past."

This post from one of my favorite bloggers sums up the whole ugly recent history of things very nicely -- http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2005/09/depraved.html
Thu at 9:06am

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend
Aaaahhhh - deep sigh of relief. Missed you!
Thu at 9:42

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Wingnut Douchebag's wife
I love starting the morning being called a nazi.
Thu at 9:46

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend
You could've chosen the Russkie analogy. I'll admit you and B are on remarkably different sides of the spectrum, but I guarantee he was not intending to call you a murderer.

I think anything history is a difficult world because years away give you different perspective. But I think some of the things they are trying to push through on textbooks here is truly damaging.

More importantly, I missed B because I have a couple other threads with my nut job conservatives.
Thu at 9:58

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend's husband
Erica, didn't you only convert to Judaism after you met Dan? Are you a sleeper agent?!?
Thu at 10:14

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend
Ok, I'm hoping she enjoyed that as much as me. I laughed out loud!
Thu at 10:16

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Wingnut Douchebag's wife
Nice. You're really gonna hit the fan when you find out i also used to be liberal
Thu at 10:36

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend
Ah shit! Guess my request to get the families together is going to have to be flushed. D is obviously a brainwasher!
Thu at 10:38

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Armadillo Joe
I wasn't calling anyone a murderer. Nor was I calling anyone a Nazi. Or a Soviet. I was calling them authoritarians and likening their strategy and tactics to those of the Nazis and Soviets. Anyone who signs on for this program of school book purification in Texas is an authoritarian with an agenda, less interested in creating a generation of well-educated citizens able to join in the give-and-take of our participatory democracy than churning out fact-averse robots, making the whole population adhere to their private system of religious and political beliefs. That's authoritarian.
Thu at 11:53am

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Armadillo Joe’s high-school friend's husband
I'm gonna hit the fan? Are you calling me shit? Freakin' Nazi....
Thu at 12:06pm via Email Reply

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Wingnut Douchebag
There's really nothing suspect in having kids read Jefferson Davis's inaugeral address...

[***Editor's Note:  Continue reading the fireworks between Armadillo Joe and Wingnut Douchebag here.] 

Just Like Kudzu

posted by Armadillo Joe

KUDZU: Pueraria lobata (syn. P. montana, P. thunbergiana) is one of about 20 species in the genus Pueraria in the pea family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae. It is a climbing, coiling, and trailing vine native to southern Japan and southeast China.

[...]

Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant.

[...]

It was subsequently discovered that the Southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control — hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, temperate winters with few hard freezes [...] and no natural predators.

[...]

kudzu has been spreading in the southern U.S. at the rate of 150,000 acres (61,000 ha) annually, "easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually." Its introduction has produced devastating environmental consequences.

Rick Pearlstein at the Washington Post online -- whose book on Goldwater I just finished and whose other book on Nixon I am currently reading -- puts this whole birther/deather/town-hell thing into perspective. But not in a way you might find encouraging:

...the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

[...]

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument.

[...]

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news.

[...]

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

[...]

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest

Really, go read the whole thing. It's worth it.

A Short History Lesson

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, Blog-O-Maniacs, Broadway Carl is away for a stretch, once again leaving it to yours truly to mind the store in his absence.

Tapping into the zeitgeist, I want to talk about health care, but more in a big picture kind of way. Because I think health-care reform is dying not merely from pressure on its throat from monied special interests -- though that is the predominant cause -- but from a structural flaw in what and who we are as Americans.

That flaw? Americans have never been able to be honest about who we are and how we got here. Ever. Whether looked at from the point of origin of the persecuted religious kooks who came here from 'Yurp seeking the freedom to practice some religious persecution of their own or from the point of origin of those greedy wild-catters who saw a continent rich in resources, ready to be raped and plundered for a quick buck back in Amsterdam or Paris or London, the American soul's twin strands of violent, brittle piety and soul-destroying avarice have always lain just under the surface -- sometimes locked in battle, sometimes allied against threats to them both, sometimes reinforcing each other in a spiraling feedback loop of mayhem and reckless cruelty.

To be clear, I am not claiming that this is all there is to who we are. Not at all. But unless and until we can acknowledge, widely and without flinching, that white people from Europe came to the Americas, killed (or allowed to die or celebrated the genocidal passing of) all the red-skinned natives and stole their land then imported black people from Africa (to say nothing of the exploitation of yellow and brown skinned peoples) to drive our burgeoning country's wealth-creation, wealth and comparative developmental advantages we still enjoy to this very day BTW, then we can't have an honest conversation about who we are. Not for us is the fearless acknowledgement of the depth of our past wrongs we see in post-apartheid South Africa or post-Nazi Germany. Our crimes are too much in the pre-moving image past, too shrouded in the mists of popular mythology to be immediate enough to escape the jingoistic cry of "revisionist!" one hears from those too convinced of their own fealty to the designs of the angels and to that of Jesus himself to allow him or herself to believe that their country has or could ever do or be anything but wholly, fully and completely righteous.

Such people love their country as a three-year old loves his mommy and daddy -- which is to say unquestioningly and utterly -- and they defend it against all comers with the same level of ferocity and self-examination as when that three-year-old throws a tantrum on the floor of the grocery store. The problem with such tantrums on a social and national level is that at least one side has guns and the wherewithal to use them. Couple that with a well-deserved and completely justified cultural inferiority/persecution complex (I'm whistling at you, Dixie) and you have an entire cultural component of this nation with the metaphorical body of an adult and mind of a child. George W. Bush was their annointed patron saint for a reason. He is their apotheosis.

But that's not all there is to it, is it? That's not all we are, not by a long shot.

Because we have such words and phrases as "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" and "We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident" and "Of the People, By the People, For the People" and we've been the country that put a man on the moon, defeated the Nazis and gave the world television, powered flight, s'mores, baseball and Billie Holiday. We also got filthy, stinking rich doing it, so are the scales even? I don't know. What do you think?

Thus, I reduce American history to the following and arrive at our lack of healthcare:

Around 1492 or so, a bunch of white guys got lost on the way to China and told the folks back home of the untold riches to be found in a new magical land far over the horizon. Being greedy for the gold and other resources they needed to run their respective war machines, the extended family of unelected monarchs who ran the whole continent of Europe used the new-found place:

1. to steal whatever wasn't bolted down and cart it back across the Atlantic -- to this day, that's why the much-admired splendor of London or Paris or Amsterdam is the way it is, they built all that with American gold -- and
2. to siphon off the undesirable portions of their population and dump them in a far-away place where they couldn't rabble-rouse and otherwise stink up the place with their curious customs and odd dietary habits practiced under the guise of "religion" and
3. to extend their kingdoms in a never-ending game of one-ups-manship played against their cousins and uncles and nieces on the other thrones of Europe.

This system worked pretty well (unless you were red-skinned or black) for several hundred years, until one group of wealthy white men -- who had no particular loyalty to those who purportedly ruled them -- got the idea in their heads that they could run a country on their own much better than some fuddy-duddy old monarch all the way across an ocean. So they cooked up some fancy language to make their cause seem noble -- Americans have been good at marketing since before there was such a thing as Americans -- and in 1783 finally won a guerilla war against the most powerful military machine on planet earth.

Problem was, truly repressed people both within that shiny new country and also all over the world read those words and took them to heart and began fighting guerilla wars of their own over the next couple hundred years (from the First Republic of France to modern day Iraq, by way of Vietnam and the Boer War). But the white guys and the descendants of those white guys who had benefitted so mightily from the land freed up by the genocide of native americans and the wealth-generation of free labor from the enslavement of Africans and the theft and exploitation of the labor and property of brown and yellow-skinned peoples were loath to surrender their historical advantages. Afterall, they had not been guilty of the crimes that built their mansions, so why should they be punished now? So, instead of facing up to the truth of their condition and perhaps summoning a little humility in the face of the enormous historical injustices which had served to enhance their relative and race-based status, they spun mythologies and fantastical stories about "hard work" and "bootstraps" and "rugged individualism" to explain their success and they began to believe their own bullshit, that they had earned their exalted place, and by logical extension those who weren't there with them had also earned theirs -- destitution and squalor are what those people deserve -- just as the monarchs of old Europe fully, truly and utterly believed that God himself had delivered them onto the throne.

But those powerful, awe-inspiring words remain. And some people, including this author, truly believe them. They inspire us. We even fought an actual shooting war amongst ourselves to enforce the ideas behind those words and, occasionally since then, we have found a way to live up their promise, to the universality of their promise, for one and all. In 1932 and 1936 we did. In 1964 we did, big time. And every time we do, the echoes of the old ways always push back at us, often violently. Sometimes we resist the push-back and our progress holds firm. Other times, we crumple under the pressure and the ugly, ancient undercurrents in our national character erupt in screeching, poo-flinging triumph against all we have built. It is a pendulum, sure, swinging left to right, but I fear the center of gravity is not halfway in-between, but firmly on the right, on the side of complacency and apathy and surrender to the darker forces of history. To keep that pendulum moving to the left ever at all, to overcome the gravity, inertia and entropy of historical forces, requires an almost infinite amount of energy.

After 8 years of Bush and 30 years of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun and 40 years in Nixonland, do we have the national will and the moral clarity to keep up the fight?

Because the people who have everything have never wanted to give anything to those who don't have anything and no matter how they got all the stuff they have, they think anyone who wants the same stuff should go out get it the same way they did: be born rich.

And that's why we won't get health-care reform.

Discuss.

The Moral Equivalent of Slavery (UPDATED)

posted by Armadillo Joe

The so-called health care "debate" seems pretty simple to me. On one side are, well, anyone not making money off killing people by neglect -- what in a criminal trial would be called depraved indifference. On the other are the gobs of people who make gobs of money by collecting fees with the promise of paying out should the need ever arise and then not only not paying out on a wide variety of pretexts with no recourse when the need actually arises, but further revoking the policy once the person in need represents a negative income stream. In any other business such behavior would be called fraud. It is so profitable that one side can effortlessly thwart the will of an overwhelming majority of the public by spreading their blood-stained dollars around on an as-needed basis. Any politician from either party whose coffers include any money from the "Death-Insurance" industry has blood on their hands, too.

In other words, one side makes money by letting people die and anyone who helps them should be held criminally liable. It's really that simple.

But the problem we have now is that we have been robbed of the language to accurately talk about the health-care debate in the moral terms it requires. George Orwell called the phenomenon "doublespeak":

Communication will become... not the transmission of meaning, but the attempt to avoid meaning in furtherance of a political end which we feel must be mad but are unable to prove

[...]

"...the whole point of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought... In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it” ... The lack of words to express rebellion stabilizes the regime, as no one will have the ability to revolt. However, it also takes away the basic rights of people to express their feelings and thoughts.

The GOP, through the tireless efforts of Frank Luntz and other like-minded villainous functionaries of the Ruling Elite, has been able use various methods of debate-framing to leach meaning out of the very words we use to discuss any particular issue. Hence, we are no longer "citizens" deserving of certain base-levels of protection against violence foreign & domestic and calamity economic or social for the simple fact of being citizens. We are now "consumers" of government services or any other public good, which crudely reduces health-care to a mere commodity, and commodities -- as everybody knows --- are naturally always subject to magic laissez-faire sparkle-ponies and assorted free-market fairy dust which always fixes everything for all time throughout all human history forever and ever, Amen. Duh. Anyone who says different is a commie or a Dirty Fucking Hippie and hates America. And makes baby Jesus cry.

That is how they've been able to control the health-care debate for almost a century, yes: a century, from Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose calling for health care reform in 1912 to FDR failing to pass NHI in the 1930's to Harry Truman running on a platform of nationalized health-care in 1948 through the modest success of the Medicare/Medicaid battles in the 60's to Ted Kennedy's heroic but doomed efforts in the 1970's and the star-crossed Clinton initiative 15 years ago. We've been fighting this battle for almost 100 years and, except for the legacy-producing aire that passed Medicare and Medicaid in the wake of the blood-sacrifice of JFK's assassination, we always lose this fight.

We're about to lose it again. In fact, I would argue we lost it when Max Baucus paid no political price whatsoever for wantonly shutting out single-payer advocates in the initial health care hearings last month. The public option is already a piss-poor substitute for single-payer, a "Separate-But-Equal" compromise that will become the doctor's office equaivalent of "white" and "colored" drinking fountains. Anyone who has ever been glared at by the checker and other people in line while trying to buy groceries with food stamps knows what I'm talking about. At this point, the public option -- if it happens at all -- will be little more than a cobbled-together false-flag hybrid so chocked full of compromises that it is essentially engineered to fail, so that the insurance industry can point to it as proof they were right all along. No good faith efforts to make health-care work for all Americans here. No sir-ee, multi-gazillion dollar CEO salaries are on the line, so shut the fuck up and stay sick and die, you Dirty Fucking Hippie.

Over at FireDogLake, Glenn W. Smith calls this situation the moral equivalent of slavery:

The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole, though the truth of it is often lost in abstract talk of insurance company profits, treatment costs, and other cold, inhuman analyses.

Today's health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand.

About 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That's more than a third the number of lives lost in battle during each year of the four-year Civil War.

Members of Congress without the moral clarity to recognize this equivalence will be condemned by history. Their spinelessness and lack of will when confronted with the power of the insurance industry is just as morally bankrupt as the American congressmen who bowed to Southern slave-owners.

[...]

In other words, people are dying because our political leaders are afraid of the insurance industry.

Condemning Americans to premature death and ill health so some can earn profits is the moral equivalent of slavery. Some may find the comparison extreme, others distasteful. But history will record it as a fact.

And members of Congress who ignore that fact can be certain that their descendants will be haunted by their blindness and cowardice.

I recognize that politics is the art of the possible. Single-payer, dissolving the corporate charters of all health-insurance companies for violations of the public good and then jailing insurance CEO's for felonious depraved indifference is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream of this DFH in an America that still protects torturers from prosecution, but I think Obama is playing it way too safe by not providing the vocal moral leadership from his bully pulpit that would give the cowardly caucus of Democratic capitulators in Congress the political cover they need to stand with their de jure constituency instead of their de facto one.

I don't think they need a collective spine-transplant because A.) we'd need a health policy that would cover it and we don't yet have it and B.) the success of such a surgery would presuppose a desire to do the right thing. They are craven opportunists, every single one of them, and I think they need to be shamed into doing what they've been elected to do by the public, not what they've been paid to do by industry. No amount of public phonecalls and letters and emails will trump the blood-dollars poured into their pockets. The only person with the power to lead this chorus of Quislings is our president. Based on what has happened so far, I fear he will attempt to navigate a middle course where there is none.

In the meantime, just try not to get sick of anything.

UPDATED:
Over at Mahablog, it seems maha's in a pretty sour mood about how this whole health-care fight is winding down and frankly so am I. In a post titled "Reform Theater," she pretty much wrote the same post as I did, but better phrased (bold-face is mine) -

...I believe that in nearly any other industrialized democracy in the world politicians would be tripping over themselves in the rush to provide universal health care coverage for citizens.

But not in the United States. In the U.S., politicians pat us on the head and tell us we’re confused. What we really want, we’re told, is to keep the private for-profit system that allows increasing numbers of Americans to fall through the cracks.

In the United States, the will of the people means nothing any more. What was once a vibrant democracy has been riddled with parasites sucking democratic values, not to mention wealth, out of it.

[...]

At this point, most of us fully expect that President Obama’s health care proposals — which were moderate and centrist to begin with, not nearly the total overhaul most of us wanted — will be watered down and compromised away to nothing but a collection of minor tweaks. And when the health care “reform” bill is signed into law there will be a great ballyhoo about it, but the American public will see no real difference. And the struggle will continue, and the Right will argue that we tried a progressive option and it didn’t work.

[...]

Years of government that cannot be made to respond to the will of Americans has resulted in political enervation. We’ve become resigned to an ever-encroaching shabbiness, an increasingly instability. None of the promises of reform made to us by the politicians we elect are ever kept to any meaningful extent, and we no longer expect them to be kept. Instead, we get reform theater, and nothing changes. That’s just how it is.

That wasn’t always the case. I am old enough to remember the attitudes of my Greatest Generation parents and their friends, who grew up with the New Deal and fought World War II. They came out of that era believing the American people, through their government, could accomplish anything. Now we’re grateful if our lights come on and our bridges don’t collapse.

Sorry if I’m feeling bleak today, but a number of news stories say the Democrats are going to be forced to compromise away the public insurance option — you know, the option that 72 percent of Americans support — to get a health care bill passed. And as far as I’m concerned that’s the only part of the package that really matters. It’s not a perfect solution, but it would make a real difference to millions of Americans and put us on the road to more genuine reform in the future.

And of course we may ask, with such broad public support for the public option, who is forcing the Dems to compromise? And the answer is, well-funded interest groups, the over-represented Right, and Big Money generally. We won’t get the reform we need, because it would cause a few well-connected people to lose money.

[... ]

We can write letters and make phone calls and even hold massive rallies until we all grow feathers and fly. It won’t matter. We know that, because we’ve tried these things in the past, with this and other issues, and were ignored. That’s why so many of us have given up.

On This Date...

posted by Armadillo Joe

Saw on Rachel Maddow last night that today, May 9th, is National Train Day.

On May 10, 1869, in Promontory Summit, Utah, the "golden spike" was driven into the final tie that joined 1,776 miles of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railways, ceremonially creating the nation′s first transcontinental railroad. And America was transformed.

Suddenly, the country was united in a way it never had been, and train travel sparked imaginations in small towns and big cities, among folk who desired adventure and businessmen who saw fortunes to be made. The sound of a train whistle was the soundtrack of happy reunions and tearful farewells. It heralded the arrival of mail, supplies and change.

The train became more than the go-to mode of transport for people and goods. It was a proud achievement of engineering vision, technical ingenuity and sweat. It was a cultural force that sparked the creative imaginations of storytellers in songs, movies and novels. Railways provided jobs for thousands of Americans. The train station became a focal point of every community, from New York City′s Pennsylvania Station to the tiny stations that dotted rural America.

Now, 140 years after the “golden spike” connected east and west, there’s never been a better time to take the train. Huge crowds and the frustrations that go with them burden our highways and airports. And at a time when we all share the same pressing concerns about environment and energy conservation, trains are a more energy-efficient mode of travel than either autos or airplanes. Riding the rails is not only a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, but also a great way to meet interesting people and see breathtaking scenery.

That′s why, in commemoration of the anniversary of the day the "golden spike" was driven, we celebrated the first-ever National Train Day on May 10, 2008. Thousands enjoyed live entertainment, train displays, raffles, prizes and surprises for big and small across the nation.

This year the event will be even better. So mark Saturday, May 9th on your calendar for a coast-to-coast celebration of the way trains connect people and places. There will be major events in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, while other events will occur in smaller markets nationwide. Join us and Discover the Rail Way during any of the National Train Day festivities that are sure to be a treat for all ages.

You guys all know what's next...

Build me some SUPERTRAINS!

Outstripped by Reality

posted by Armadillo Joe

I have been struggling to compose a post about the oncoming implosion of the Rethugli-twit Party and the self-induced death spiral they just can't seem to pull out of, but the Specter defection yesterday seems to me to be that threatened implosion made extant. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair quotes from a very glum David Frum:

The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a “wake-up call.” His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against

About which Wolcott opines:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter's defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of "good riddance/get lost/don't let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out" and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

But Lance Mannion is pretty sure that Specter switching labels is something of a collapse (caused by the inhabitants) of the last pole holding up the GOP's decaying tent:

Everything the Republicans and their paid propagandists in the Media have been doing and saying since November 5 has had one goal.

Holding the Party together.

It's always fun to remind them who won the last election, but they really don't need the reminding. They know the results. And they know what the results suggest about what's in store for them. They can read the polls. Barack Obama is wildly popular. Independents have abandoned them. The demographic trends are against them. If things continue this way in less than a generation it will be easier to find a person under forty who identifies as Zoroastrian or philatelist than one who identifies as Republican.

Under these circumstances, the sensible thing to do is fall back and re-group. Gather the most loyal and reliable and determined troops together and do everything you can to keep up their morale and ready to fight back when the time to fight back arrives.

The smart thing to do, then, would seem to rally the base, keep them happy and energized, and donating, and get them out there working for the next election.

The trouble with this for the Republicans is that their base is their problem.

The base is insane.

And Maha sez that such a spin out of control and off into Kukoo-Land is too long a trip from which to walk back:

the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives.

Frankly, I say it couldn't happen to a finer bunch of assholes. They and their fellow travellers have spent the better part of fifty years (to say nothing of kicking it into high gear over the last ten or so) calling me and all my friends traitors and ni**er-lovers and slutty wimmins and faggoty perverts and terrorist-pal-around-ers and otherwise generally spewing eliminationist rhetoric directed at us, yet only thinly disguised as "satire" to avoid being arrested for incitement. They have been inviting this circular feeding frenzy for decades.

But we need to be cautious. The end of the GOP as an effective political party is not the end of the fight. Not hardly.

The Rethugli-puke Party does not circumscribe The Reich Wing or conservatism in toto or the Ruling Class or any other group of those self-identified classes of toxic political actors who are collectively and as individuals all a deep, mortal and existenstial threat to the free and just America that those tending-toward-blueishness among us revere. The GOP has merely been the political wing of that movement since all those dirty fucking hippies and promiscuous wimmin-folk and uppity negroes scared the bejebus out of Ma and Pa Goober back in the 1960's and they decided that war-mongering plutocratic corporate overlords were better political allies than anything to be found in the ranks of LBJ's ni**er-lovin' party. Ever since, the GOP has been acting as the political expression of a particularly nasty, fearful, racist, violent, authoritarian strain of American nativism. The Rethugli-goon Party has been their political wing just as Sinn Fein acts as the political organ of the IRA.

No, the deranged GOP clown car of liars, degenerates and reprobates, with their socially corrosive tax codes and hostility to the public sphere, with their racism, sexism, authoritarianism and bigotry, with their love of War and Jesus as the Answer for Everything and their brittle, tinny jingoism, with their haughty sanctimony and sadistic, mean-spirited glee at the sight or even the thought of others suffering in pursuit of their petty aims have all been begging to be blasted into oblivion for decades. Any chance we have now to chase these cockroaches, to pursue these scurrying, slithering hordes as they disguise themselves in women's clothing and shove onto the lifeboats or change into civilian clothes, burn their uniforms and try to blend into the general population ahead of the advancing army, any chance we have at all to chase them relentlessly, to shine a light on their true identities and expose them as liars and thieves, to ruin their chances of making a living anywhere but anonymously shoveling manure out of a barn in southern Patagonia, we must take and take without mercy. Because we didn't clear decks after W's grand-pappy tried to overthrow FDR and we didn't clear the decks after McCarthy and we didn't clear the decks after Watergate and we didn't clear the decks after Iran-Contra, because we failed to track down and destroy the bad actors back then we are at war in Iraq today, cheerlead the whole way by survivors and descendants of all those previous scandals.

The time to end this cycle is now.

Even as Specter's departure marks the likely historical end of the 20th Century Republican Party, the American political landscape left in its wake remains ravaged by the war they've waged, as de-forested as an Agent Orange'd jungle, as pock-marked and cratered as a World War One no-man's land, a smoldering remnant of one political party's scorched-earth march to hegemony, littered with political landmines and unexploded human ordnance, hiding and poised to maim and bedevil our peace-loving descendants for generations, no matter how many swords Obama inspires us convert into plowshares in the coming decades.

A Few Basic Rules

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, you Blog-O-Maniacs! B'way Carl has again asked me to mind the store in his absence, but told me no SUPERTRAINS! so I'll have to find something else to write about.

How about social justice?

Or just basic vengeance?

Because when we evolve out of our natural state, when we build institutions and organize ourselves into entities that coerce or persuade through incentives or through the naked threat of violence (or the actual use of violence) the lone caveman to stop bashing other cavemen on the head and taking their cavegirls, we have formed a government.

No one ever signed on for such an enterprise, mind you, because we don't choose the time and location of our births. Besides, someone has to be in charge and who was that first caveman to tell all the other cavemen to stop bashing heads? Well, he was the baddest MF of them all and what he says goes. Until some bigger and badder MF comes along and does the same to him. And that leads us to all sorts of questions about lines of succession and who gets to be in charge, because if its a simple matter of just bashing heads until no one is left to say you can't have the throne, anyone can eventually become king, right? Its still true to this day for dictatorships throughout South America and Africa. Thus, the folks at the top of the food chain eventually declared that god himself put them there and everyone else should just accept that fact and go about their business of growing food and otherwise fighting and dying for the king's ambitions.

What could go wrong with a system like that?

Which is why, by the 17th & 18th Centuries A.D., a bunch of idle rich hanging out in the salons of the European continent who had grown weary of hearing this whole "divine right of kings" crap to justify every cockamamie idea that ever popped into a monarch's head -- ideas which usually resulted in the deaths of hundred or thousands of their countrymen, too boot -- and who were young and idealistic (as youth are wont to be) finally cooked up a bunch of alternate ideas about social contracts and "consent of the governed" to explain how and why we got here, with all those kings and bureacracies and gendarmes and all that sort of thing. For a few decades, all their lofty rhetoric and fancy words remained just the college newspaper Op-Ed screeds of their day, laying fallow and unheeded, until a bunch of yeoman farmers in a far-flung British colony over on the American continent (and the wealthy transplants who owned the land those farmers worked and saw a way to keep even more of their money) got a hold of those ideas as a way of giving the finger to that clown King George who thought he could do whatever he wanted because, well, he was king.

A couple of years and one semi-hot revolution later, we had ourselves a king-free government, though not for lack of trying on the part of a great number of our so-called Founding Fathers. Luckily, our own George (Washington, that is) had read enough of all that coffee house prattle from Yurp to actually believe some of it and, to our everlasting relief, declined every attempt to put a crown on his head.

But other mischief was afoot back on the Continent and enough peasants got tired enough of starving and dying for Marie Antoinette's pearls that they had a little revolution of their own. You might recall it had something to do with guillotines and some cat named Robespierre. From that blood-soaked chaos, some time later (like almost 30 years later), the dictator who rose up from humble origins on a small island off the French coast to have royalty bow down before him was ultimately defeated on a battlefield in Belgium, but not before reshaping the way government ruled over the people who resided on the land it controlled. Consent of the governed became our notion of the Rule of Law and the people were assured a voice in their own government. OK, only if they were white and male, but at least divinity was no longer a pre-requisite for governing and that put us on the road to the expansion of suffrage, battles which are being fought -- even in this country -- to this very day.

All of which brings me to this quote:

“No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?” e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.

I think you guys can predict my response to this Marie Antoinette from Citigroup:



Because when I use the phrase "Ruling Class" to refer to a certain group of people in this country, I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. They are a direct line from the aristocracy of a former day -- not always by blood, mind you, but always by disposition -- and they really and truly think this country, all the people in it and its institutions and all of its natural resources, belong to them. The purpose of this country and all the people in it is to support them in the oppulent lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed and to do whatever they require to maintain the economic and political structures (domestic and foreign) that enable that lifestyle, which is why they have no qualms about soaking up our tax dollars when they try so hard to avoid paying any taxes at all and then sending the poor and brown-skinned among us either to prison or off to a war they themselves are too precious to fight. Like Vietnam, Iraq is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

The previous president is from the Ruling Class and he sure as shit acted like the military was his personal revenge and ego-boosting tool, which Cardinal Richelieu Dick Cheney was more than happy to exploit for his own nefarious ends.

Whether AIG bonuses or torture to justify a ginned-up war, the impulse is the same for these people, the logical waters they drink are drawn from the same poisoned well, and the natural political home for their functionaries is the GOP. But these people and their pet political party didn't come out of nowhere. They have deep roots in human history and this country is no exception, no matter what our glorious mythologies may tell us about what a free and noble people we are, about what an exception to history our story represents.

For more on that, go read driftglass.

Plus, some SUPERTRAINS! --

Choo-choo trains RAWK!