American Patrol

Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s greatest accomplishments and the occasion of what might arguably be one of the finest patriotic speeches delivered in the history of the United States.

We spent it, and a good bit of the week leading up to it, talking about a former shock jock from the zany morning drive time crew turned coke-fueled drunk turned megalomaniac Fox News commentator who went out of his way to sully that anniversary. They’re probably going to talk about it on the morning shows tomorrow.

The thing is, as appalling as I find Beck and as egregious as his crimes against dignity and tolerance have been, it isn’t strictly speaking his fault. We as a society, as a culture, as a body politic have no reason whatsoever to pay attention to the poor sod. We know he lies, we know he manipulates, we have some fairly well documented suspicions that he is out of his tiny mind, and yet we persist.

Funny thing about attention whores-- they tend to go away once you’ve stopped paying attention.

And funny thing about debasement-- it’s often largely voluntary.

Seriously, once and for all-- there is nothing wrong with Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Hannity, O”Reilly and the rest that can’t be solved by a mere collective turning of the head. Yes, dialogue from diverse viewpoints is completely necessary, but coherence, consistency, and honesty are the minimum price of admission.

Beck and company consistently talk utter bullshit, and we continue to listen. Shame on us.

The long awaited sell off of some of the personal effects of author J.D. Salinger (who is dead) has begun with the auctioning of the repository of some of his most exemplary work. The item is in original condition. Bids start at $1 million, and are being taken here.

Okay-- this crap has to stop now.

The “controversy” surrounding the newly renamed Park 51 center-- the name “Cordoba House” having been made controversial itself for obscure reasons-- is the number one story and the number one political issue in the country. It isn’t a story, really, or at least the real story isn’t being told-- again, the site is not at ground zero, and is not a mosque. It also isn’t a national issue-- it’s a local question in the Borough of Manhattan, where the local government has already signed off on the project and the majority of local residents, according to polls, don’t object to it.

And it isn’t a political issue-- even those most vociferously opposed to the project stipulate that the project’s organizers are well within their rights and that there’s no real legal basis for stopping them. Absent any possible political solution to the “problem,” the demands of the opposition amount to no more than an empty insistence that their sentiments be shared and validated.

It’s bad enough that this collection of fallacies and sweet nothings is dominating the national dialogue at a time when real decisions need to be made on real issues to alleviate real crises. What’s worse is that people are getting hurt. Not people’s feelings-- actual people. The spectacle of national leaders expressing naked anti-Muslim sentiment has, inevitably, inspired naked anti-Muslim action-- terroristic threats, property crimes on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses and homes, random assaults on individual Muslims, and angry anti-Muslim demonstrations protesting nothing more than the existence of Muslims in communities nation wide. The longer this goes on, the worse it will get.

If, as many conservatives are insisting, we are to treat this as a “values issue” in the upcoming elections, then the choice is clear. We can either stand with those who are willing to cynically foment fear and hatred to tar their political opponents and obscure their shortcomings on the real issues, or with those who support the rule of law and the American traditions of tolerance and equality.

A widely reported CNN/Opinion Research poll released this Wednesday revealed that 68% of Americans oppose “(the) plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand.” Far less widely reported is the fact that in America, this opposition doesn’t, and shouldn’t, make a damn bit of difference.

“(O)ne wonders if the will of the American people will once again be ignored by the powers that be,” muses Raven Clabough, blogging at the New American, no doubt speaking for many of the opposed. This makes me wonder where, and under what form of government, these people think they’re living.

There are many reasons to ignore this poll. As Jed Lewison writes in Daily Kos, the poll question itself--”As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?”-- is faulty, framed in the terms defined by the opposition and basically eliciting a raw opinion on the building itself with no reference to any of the underlying issues or any actions that could be taken in response to that opinion.

And, as pointed out by Jean Marbella of the Baltimore Sun among many others, the entire “controversy” proceeds from false premises. The “Ground Zero Mosque” isn’t being proposed for “Ground Zero.” The location is two blocks away from the WTC site, and is neither visible from or readily accessible to it. Neither is the proposed building, strictly speaking, a mosque, but rather a Muslim sponsored cultural center that would feature, along with a swimming pool, athletic facility, auditorium, and restaurant, a mosque space for Muslim prayer: as Marbella says, “more akin to a YMCA than a dedicated house of worship.” Those who oppose the building probably haven’t been exposed to the latter premise. As for the former, they have been sold the idea that the whole area of lower Manhattan surrounding the former WTC site-- including, presumably, the strip joint a block away from the proposed cultural center -- is “hallowed ground.”

Exactly none of this is relevant. Stripped of false characterization and sanctimony, this situation is pretty clear cut. An American religious group, guaranteed freedom of religious practice under the First Amendment to the Constitution, is making use of a piece of private property which they own outright. Because of the religion that they practice-- that is, because of religious discrimination-- certain people have raised objections to this. Some of these objections are no doubt based on sincere feelings. I am sincerely sorry that they feel that way, but neither their feelings nor mine are relevant either. Inalienable rights are inalienable rights, and are neither dependent on individual emotional reactions nor up for referendum. They are fundamental to what we stand for as a nation.

The reason that we’re all talking about this is the exploitation of those sincere feelings by a political group with a history of exploiting fear and anti-Muslim hatred for political gain. For some odd reason, though, the headline on this story isn’t “Americans Led Around By The Nose By Conservative Establishment Again.” It should be.

I was reading the lead entry in Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook blog in the Washington Post yesterday, which excerpted a story on Christina Romer’s resignation by the Post’s Lori Montgomery, when I ran across the following: “It was not immediately clear who would replace Romer. White House observers called Austan Goolsbee, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, an obvious choice, but that would leave Obama without a woman on his senior economic team."

“Who,” I thought, “could possibly give a shit?” Though I favor the appointment of women to positions of responsibility in government and would not object to a qualified woman replacing Romer as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for any reason unrelated to politics and economics, the suggestion that gender might be a primary consideration in the selection of Romer’s replacement struck me as both ridiculous and offensive, a triumph of PC and PR over common sense. Economic analysis and policy making are functions unrelated to the reproductive organs, and in the current economy the gender of the individuals who compose the President’s senior economic team should be far down the list of concerns. Male, female, who cares?

Maybe not the people who are selecting Romer’s replacement. Rereading the Lori Montgomery quote above, the only thing I can say for sure is that the quote itself is an absolute goddamn mess. Who exactly are these White House observers? Observers in the White House? Observers of the White House? And was that final clause, the one that set me off in the first place, their observation or Montgomery’s? None of this is clear from Montgomery’s text, and bad reporting could easily be walking hand in hand with crappy writing here.

Reading more on the subject this morning hasn’t cleared up the issue one bit. Matt Taibbi asserts in his coverage of the resignation that Romer’s lack of a Y chromosome was a key reason for her selection over Goolsbee back when the original White House economic team was being assembled last year. The Reuters story on likely replacements for Romer cites, along with Goolsbee, Laura Tyson, a current member of the Economic Recovery Advisory board and head of the Council of Economic Advisors under Bill Clinton who features no unsightly dangly bits whatsoever. Tyson, though highly qualified, seems likely to make common cause with Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Rahm Emanuel, and the other ex-Clintonites who have striven so mightily to keep Administration policy timid, ineffectual, and Wall Street friendly, and would thus be a horrible choice for the position regardless of gender, certainly not because of it.

Unfortunate, then, that the issue was ever raised in the first place. If Tyson is selected over Goolsbee, it will probably be due to the intercession of her fellow Friends Of Bill C rather than her chromosomal make up. Thanks to the ham fisted injection of gender politics into the story by Montgomery and/or her sources, though, it might not play that way, which can only be bad for everybody.

“The rich are different from you and me.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Yes, they have more money.”
-- Ernest Hemingway (probably apocryphal)

"...Demand is weak; we are responding by cutting the fat and becoming leaner and meaner; when demand picks up, we'll be in good shape. ..Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that's staring you right in the face: when is ‘the consumer’ going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him."
-- Carl Hegelman, the Awl, cited by Ezra Klein, Washington Post, 7/26/10

I’ve long noted something interesting happening between the segments on the news, during those “words from our sponsor” that under normal circumstances would have me diving for the DVR remote. Annoying as they are, the commercial breaks in a program represent a judgement on the program in question by the advertising and public relations people who purchase the commercials. The annoyance, though sometimes exploited as an attention grabber, is a side effect. What the sponsors of a program are really trying to do is make the most effective use of their advertising dollars by presenting their message to the people who might actually be persuaded to spend money on their product.

Just what those products are, then, can provide an interesting commentary on the kind of person (presumably according to market research) who watches news programming. This person, so far as one can tell from what is being sold to him or her, is older (pharmaceuticals, insurance, medical supplies), and has plenty of disposable (airlines, resorts, high end automobiles, jewelry) and investible (banks and financial service firms, and corporate “feel good” ads aplenty) income. People like this are known in the trades as High Net Worth Individuals, and known to most of us as the rich. If one sticks around after those commercials are over and watches the news itself, it quickly becomes obvious why rich people would watch the news. It is, after all, all about them, and, by extension, not about us especially.

This is especially true of the number one story in the country for several years running, the economy. Stories about economic recovery, for example, are at this point almost entirely about the rich, for only the rich have recovered economically-- corporate profits are up, in some cases to record levels, and the stock market, while a bit queasy, is doing fine. The 2.4% rate of economic growth in the 2nd quarter of this year, though somewhat anemic, was nonetheless economic growth, and if it’s like economic growth in past quarters, its benefits went disproportionately to the people in the upper 10%, a nice chunk of this one probably going into those corporate profits and that stock market. Where it’s definitely not going is into job creation and wage enhancements-- unemployment hasn’t improved, and real wages have actually been decreasing as corporate profits have increased.

This suggests that even the growth we’re experiencing, however meager, is unsustainable. The main engine of economic growth in this country is consumer spending, which has not recovered largely because consumers haven’t. They haven’t largely because the vast majority of them are not High Net Worth Individuals. They never were, really, but over the course of the last forty years the average American consumer has gone to heroic lengths to keep consuming, sending newly liberated wives out into the job market for a second income in the ’70’s, putting more and more on the credit cards when inflation ate into both incomes, tapping into home equity when the credit cards topped out, and spending madly all the while. Now that one or both partners are dealing with reduced hours or positions eliminated outright and the mortgage on the house is either under water or in foreclosure, there really isn’t a lot more they can do.

As for the High Net Worth Individuals, who are doing quite nicely, thank you, and some of whose profits are the result of cutting labor costs to the bone, gutting collective bargaining and union membership, and squeezing more and more productivity out of the remaining workforce, there really isn’t a lot they seem willing to do.

This should bring the whole concept of “economic recovery” into question. What exactly is is that we’re trying to recover? The inequities described above aren’t the result of the this last economic crash, but have been worsening for the last few decades, and are likely a substantial part of the cause of the crisis in the first place. Still, the addressing of those inequities has played almost no part in “recovery” policy, ignored in favor of basically rebuilding the same house of cards that just collapsed. Maybe they’ll get addressed after the inevitable next crisis.

By the way, it’s not just economic news in this country that’s largely about the rich-- other stories are too. Illegal immigration? It’s so hard to get good help these days. And all those stories we’ve been seeing about race lately? It’s no coincidence-- uncomfortable as race can be as a topic, it’s what High Net Worth Individuals would prefer that we talk about instead of class.

You know that frank national conversation about race we’ve been meaning to have? We didn’t have it last week, either. Which, among a great many other shames and pities the week brought us, is a shame and a pity. The full story told by Shirley Sharrod in the once infamous NAACP tape, as corroborated by the white Georgia farm couple she encountered and aided twenty four years ago, was a formative experience for all three, and would have made a dandy place to start. No soap, though. Instead, we were treated to an epic display of the cynicism, dishonesty, willful misunderstanding, and moral cowardice that will prevent us from having such a conversation for some time to come.

Politics in America tends to hit the level of metacriticism without stopping very long at either poetry or prose, and the convoluted story of how we heard Sharrod’s story in the first place presents a much brighter and shinier object for the news media than the story itself ever could. By now you’ve heard it over, under, sideways, and down, so I won’t belabor it further, except to note a few of the more poignant lessons this “teaching moment” has produced that might have gotten lost in the din.

*One of the many, many problems with the vaunted “24 hour news cycle” is the fact that it provides far less than 24 hours worth of news. Instead, we get self-serving analysis, far more repetitions than even Goebbels required to make a truth, endless staring matches with plane crashes, car chases, and the like, and the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories. Another is that the media seems so transfixed with the supposedly blistering pace of it all that things like corroboration, fact checking, and plain old reportage have become ballast, discarded at the first sign of things slowing down, leading to the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories.

*The fact that the initial Shirley Sharrod stories were utter horseshit didn’t slow things down one bit. Fox News, where even points of internal consistency were ballast discarded many miles ago, pulled a quick and nasty 180, going from demanding Sharrod’s resignation to criticizing the Administration for forcing Sharrod to resign “before all the facts were in.” CNN meanwhile tried to parlay some video of Anderson Cooper posing some baldly obvious questions to Andrew Breitbart into a claim that they were the real journalists in the game despite having ridden the manure spreader for most of the previous day.

*The response of the Rahm Emanuel-led White House political operation-- a/k/a “Pavlov’s White House”--was a work of breathtaking and dangerous ineptitude. In trying to short circuit the situation in a single news cycle for fear of how it would play in the right wing media, they managed to create a story that would dominate coverage for the rest of the week and serve to legitimize the worst of the right wing media.

The entire situation boils down to one inevitable conclusion-- that the governance of this country has to a great degree been given over to the attempts of cowards to placate liars. And that is bad news indeed.

“Time ensured that all modern media, not just print, but radio and television later, would henceforth depend on narrative, aspiring to the condition of immediacy, favoring description and personal stories over analysis, and avoiding excessive resort to abstractions. The magazine’s enormous, enduring influence defined, very clearly, the dilemma of journalistic popularization, posing the question of whether, in making everything wholly accessible, one didn’t end up conveying nothing of importance to harried, impatient readers.”
--Nicholas Fraser, in his review of "The Publisher: Henry Luce and his American Century" by Alan Brinkley, in Harper’s, June 2010

“Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.”
-- Elvis Costello

The main project of Beltway Conventional Wisdom-- an arcane alchemical process that attempts to spin the straw of current events into “The Narrative,” a predictive unified field theory of American politics, or at least into the fool’s gold of self-fulfilling prophecy-- is by its nature a perverse one, roughly akin to trying to make a useful relief map of a pot of boiling water. The sheer level of cognitive dissonance between The Narrative (neatly summed up by CNN’s Candy Crowley as “The Republicans have the wind at their backs” going into the 2010 elections) and the actual news lately has turned the act of Narrative maintenance into a strenuous two handed wank.

Still, Conventional Wisdom abides, laying a thick blanket of silly assumptions over the news to obscure its details and shepherd The Narrative to its dramatic, high ratings generating conclusion in the fall. These assumptions are so ingrained into the public discourse that the main practitioners of the dark art of Narrative husbandry-- the aforementioned Crowley and many of her CNN colleagues, the Washington Post’s David Broder and Chris “The Fix” Cillizza, The New York Times’ David Brooks, and the collection of Sunday Morning Quarterbacks that gather around This Week and Press the Meat-- routinely invoke them without even cursory examination.

Underlying the entire enterprise is the hallowed First Principal of Conventional Wisdom, the Horse Race Assumption, which states that serious political analysis consists solely of responding to every event by posing the question “Is this good/ bad for the Democrats/ Republicans in the upcoming elections?”, and that the answer to that question is always more interesting and newsworthy than the details of actual governing, which are considered boring and “wonky,” and in many cases more interesting and newsworthy than the factual details of the story itself.

The either/or slashes imbedded in the Golden Question tip us off to another underlying principle of Conventional Wisdom, the Binary Assumption. Simply put, this states that there are two sides to every story. Only two. The act of objective journalism, then, consists of having one representative from each side state his or her position and then breaking for commercial. These segments will then be honed down into short sound bites that will be used as supporting material for further stories, with no reference whatsoever to the validity of the arguments presented or the facts of the underlying issue. Any points of view existing outside this bifurcated mainstream are considered extreme and irrelevant to the Golden Question, and are thus summarily ignored. Those who express such viewpoints are spoilers (if they are running for office), crackpots (if they are not), or both (Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, etc.), even if such viewpoints are held by a majority of the country’s citizens.

This morning’s coverage brought up a perfect case in point. A recent poll indicates that fully 62% of Americans surveyed believe that the country is on the wrong track, as opposed to 29% who think its on the right one. This, the Russertian Congregation intoned, was Bad For The Democrats/Good for the Republicans. It may well be, and there may well be an argument to be made in its favor of that position, but none of them bothered to make it. Instead, they invoked the Binary Assumption-- there are only two available “tracks” for the nation, and those who disagree with one must therefore agree with the other.

Which is ridiculous. To me, the real story behind 62% of the country believing the country is on the wrong track is that 62% of the country now qualifies for nomination to a Keen Grasp of the Obvious award. The state of the nation and the course that it is on are clearly, dangerously unsustainable, leading one to question the yearly incomes, alcohol consumption, or psychotropic medication requirements of the 29% who think everything’s skippy. I myself think that the country is on the wrong track. Most of the people I know think the country’s on the wrong track. Anecdotally at least, that is not particularly good news for the Republicans-- an estimable part of that number, while disappointed with the Democrats, would no sooner willingly vote for a Republican than pull their eyeball out with a grapefruit spoon. Apparently I know a lot of extremist crackpots.

Further down the rabbit hole, discussions of the new Washington Post/ABC News poll centered on its finding that 58% of respondents indicated low or no confidence in President Obama and how this was Good for Republicans/Bad for Democrats. This occurred despite the poll’s finding that 72% expressed low or no confidence in Congressional Republicans, a poorer showing than both Obama and Congressional Democrats. Much more interesting to them, and much better for The Narrative, was the finding in the generic Congressional ballot that Republicans were leading 47% to 46%. This was presented not as a statistical dead heat, but as Good News for the Republicans. When the contradiction between that finding and the low confidence numbers for Congressional Republicans was pointed out, no mention was made that by indicating that they had lower confidence in Republicans than Democrats but were nonetheless intending to vote for them fully 19% of the respondents were engaging in definitive Orwellian Doublethink.

“See how angry the voters are?” they cheerfully bellowed instead. “That’s Bad for the Democrats.” And The Narrative ground on.

“You know, Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
-- Dick Cheney

“He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich
Stupid bitch...”
-- Monty Python, “Dennis Moore” theme

One million seven hundred thousand Americans lost their unemployment benefits on the day before the Fourth of July. Another three million two hundred thousand are likely to by the end of the month. Republicans in the Senate have offered many reasons for refusing to support the extension of unemployment benefits to these people, several of which are so morally reprehensible as to deserve posts on their own, but the reason they all seem to agree on is that extending unemployment benefits adds to the deficit, and would have to be paid for with other cuts in spending before they’d agree to them.

Except no cuts in military spending. We’re at war. With Terror. Al Qaida. Osama. Boogah boogah!!!! No cutting any Department of Defense projects whatsoever, even the ones the Department of Defense doesn’t particularly want. Likewise business subsidies. Likewise what many of them refer to as “lawn forcement,” except as it relates to paying cops’ salaries (union members that they are).

And no raising revenues. As every good Republican knows, any attempt to raise government revenue actually decreases government revenue (or, in the original Neanderthal, “Taxes BAD!!”). Even letting the sunset clauses their own party voted in to the Bush tax cuts counts as “raising taxes” and will be placed on the doorstep of the “tax and spend” Democrats like a flaming bag of poo.

Read their lips...Republicans are Serious About Deficits, one of the reasons the exiled Republican hegemony is preparing to make their triumphal blah blah blah... Sound the vuvuzelas...

It’s all a scam, of course, the political equivalent of one of those engine propeller gadgets at the county fair that supposedly gets you 40% better gas milage, all delivered with a smile and a shoeshine, too good to be true because it just plain isn’t. As admirable as Republican fealty to conservative principals might be on some purely abstract level, those principals-- no new taxes, no defense cuts, ongoing war, support for “private sector incentives”-- make any serious attempt at deficit reduction an empirical impossibility and any argument they might make on the subject an empty construct. Contrary to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), ample evidence exists that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficits, and reliable projections indicate they’ll add over three trillion more to it by 2018 if allowed to continue.

It’s an old scam at that, three decade old Reaganite orthodoxy as interpreted by the W Revival (a/k/a “what got us here”), and one that failed spectacularly for both of them, at least on a policy level. Policy was never the point of the exercise, though-- it’s been an open secret, openly acknowledged even by some members of those Administrations, that reduced deficits and balanced budgets (things neither President achieved) were mere Trojan horse selling points for the goal of disempowering government, the better to usher in a market based utopia of unimpeded rich people, with a government that shields them from the inconveniences of accountability and democracy. That actually worked pretty well.

Like many a good scam, this one involves misdirection by emotional appeal. This deficit, we are told, is a burden we are putting on the backs of our children, cue violins. Kindly avert your eyes from the fact that some of those backs might be a little stooped from malnutrition and poor health care caused by cuts Republicans are willing to make. They believe in starving the beast, and don’t give much thought to who else may be starving-- there’s charities for that.

Even if the Republican’s mania for cutting deficits and taxes were a sincere appeal for a policy that actually worked, it would still be macroeconomically idiotic. Shifting money away from the unemployed (who would spend it, stimulating economic activity) and towards the already wealthy (who are likely to save and financialize it, laying the foundations for another economic house of cards) is a deeply recessionary move in an already recessionary economy.

Beltway conventional wisdom tells us that Republican fiscal conservatism in all its counterfactual, value blind, ahistorical glory, will power a Republican “tidal wave” come November. Beltway conventional wisdom thinks we’re idiots. If that tidal wave actually happens, Beltway conventional wisdom is correct in that assumption.

1) A Keen Grasp of the Obvious award to The Honorable Joseph Tauro, US District Judge for the State of Massachusetts, for declaring that two key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Tauro cited the law’s clear violation of the equal protection clause and its “offense” to the tenth amendment, stating it encroached on individual states’ long recognized right to establish the definition of marriage under state law.

In so doing, Judge Tauro put himself in prime KGO territory, for the extraconstitutional nature of DOMA has been prima facie since 1996, when my taller-than-me fifteen year old son was a toddler. DOMA existed solely for the purpose of appending the words “except for gay men and lesbians” to whole sheafs of Federal law, obviously establishing unequal treatment, and carved an unsupported gaping exception into the Full Faith and Credit clause for good measure (though Judge Tauro’s rulings did not address that clause specifically). The question of how such a thorough affront to the constitution and simple precedent could be passed, much less sit festering in Federal law for fourteen years, would make a fascinating sociopolitical case study on its own.

2) It will be interesting to see how the far right responds to Judge Tauro’s use of a conservative, tenth amendment based argument-- their favorite song and dance lately on issues from health care reform to stimulus spending to immigration-- in the furtherance of gay rights. Or rather, it would be if the far right in this country, for all their yammering about the constitution, had any real grounding in constitutional law and weren’t in a constant state of unashamed internal contradiction and hypocrisy in the first place.

3) As important a development as Judge Tauro’s rulings represent, it should be noted that this is far from the end of the story on DOMA. Their effect is limited for the moment to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and appeal to the Federal First Circuit and beyond is all but inevitable. The fact that these appeals will be pursued by the Obama Justice Department is bound to lead to some disquiet on the left and criticism of the Administration, and shouldn’t-- the Justice Department is, in theory at least, independent of the President, and is duty bound to defend challenges to Federal law in the same way the system is duty bound to provide a rigorous defense for a red handed serial killer. And while the thought of this case reaching the Roberts Court is a somewhat scary one, it shouldn’t be, either-- Tauro’s ruling is predicated on a lack of any rational basis for the law in the first place, and any successful appeal will have to explicitly establish that the law serves a compelling interest not grounded in mere prejudice. Seeing those particular cards laid out on the table will contribute much to our national discussion of gay/ lesbian rights in particular and on civil rights in general.

It’s a discussion well worth having on as high a level as we can manage, and if at the end of it the Defense of Marriage Act stays dead, then the legal system works just fine and we can get on to one of the many next things we need to address in this country. If it doesn’t, then we have some work to do. Stay tuned...

Before I get started, a little disclaimer on some of the headings below and on The Ash Heap in general. In most cases, casting something on The Ash Heap is a recognition of its fundamental uselessness, and is a dishonor generally reserved for concepts so illogical, counterfactual, or egregiously failed as to have no further place in a rational discussion of the subject at hand. In a culture that actually had rational discussions, that would be that. In American culture circa 2010, however, concepts cast on The Ash Heap are perfectly capable of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and further affecting, or even dominating, the national discussion, utility and reason be damned.

That said, the Gulf oil spill should prove just as damaging to the following ideas as it has been to the economy and ecology of the Gulf Coast.

“...GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEM. GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.”: This quote from Ronald Reagan, the deficit increasing, tax raising President conservatives inexplicably revere, has provided the rhetorical lynch pin of their governing philosophy ever since. Government cannot do anything right (an assertion for which they offer ample proof every time they get control of it), and should get out of the way and let the marketplace do its magic. Deregulation, lax oversight, and nod-and-wink safety and inspection standards have been the result, and have now further resulted in the biggest environmental disaster in American history.

This one is so ripe for the ashes that not even the conservatives themselves believe it any more. Since the gulf spill they have called for extensive federal involvement up to and including the commandeering of boats to clean up the results of this particular example of free enterprise, and criticized the Administration for not being activist enough in handling the spill and not acting quickly enough to reform the corrupt, slipshod regulatory regime conservatives had established on their watch. Internal consistency has never been a hallmark of Republican policy, but this insistence that the government they’ve hated, slandered, and tried to starve should take responsibility for the irresponsible actions of a multibillion dollar corporation puts them both outside the realm of rational discourse and firmly and consistently on the side of that irresponsible multibillion dollar corporation. The Party of Hell No, indeed.

REPUBLICAN ENERGY POLICY, A/K/A “DRILL, BABY, DRILL”: The idea that the exploitation of domestic oil reserves would provide a path to American energy independence was always complete horseshit, a cynical attempt by 2008 Republican candidates to exploit the then-hot issue of rising gas prices that never had anything like practical value. The US uses over twenty percent of world oil resources. It controls just over 1.5 percent of proven oil reserves, meaning that if all of those reserves could be safely and quickly exploited-- an assumption recent events clearly argue against-- American production would only cover a small fraction of American consumption.

Or would, that is, if oil produced in America was somehow pumped into special barrels marked “AMERICAN OIL” and exclusively refined, priced, and consumed here. It isn’t, and those who think it is are wished a belated welcome to the global marketplace, wherein a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil whether it came from Texas or Siberia and the economic entities doing the buying and selling are multinational corporations whose only allegiance is to the bottom line. Take, for instance, the company currently in the news for their role in the production of American oil-- BP, formerly British Petroleum.

The fact is, we use way too much of the stuff, we import the vast majority of what we use, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do to address the problem from the supply side. We could cut demand, of course, but we won’t.

LITTLE FEELINGS: Tony Hayward is distraught. Barack Obama seems emotionally distant. Does anyone care, and if so, why?

STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM: We are told to number among the victims of this catastrophe the pensioners of Britain, who have been deriving up to one sixth of their income from the usually generous BP dividend, and BP stockholders in general, who have lost something like half the value of their shares. While some limited sympathy can be justified for the pensioners, whose nonvoting shares are likely held in managed instruments and who probably never made a conscious decision to tie their futures to BP’s, the assertion that those investors who did have that choice are in any way victims here is both morally repugnant and a direct repudiation of the main tenets of investor capitalism.

I’m a little amazed that anyone needs reminding in this biz school dominated culture, but it works like this: when one buys a share of stock, one is buying a measure of ownership of the issuing company, representing both an entitlement to a proportional share of the company’s profits and a responsibility for a proportional share of its losses. If the latter outweigh the former, you have made a bad investment, and you lose-- tough shit, schmucko. The notion that such a loss should be in anyway offset or compensated, particularly through public sector action, renders the entire capitalist system a particularly successful long con.

“...And the young people ask, ‘What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question...
-- Eric Bogle, “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"

"You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
-- George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), Easy Rider, screenplay Dennis Hopper et al.

The role of Memorial Day here in the Republic of Amnesiastan is, obviously, a complicated one (I offered a brief primer here), and seems particularly so this year. We are, they tell us, at war, two wars actually, neither of which we understand particularly well or approve of at all. The US Senate just simultaneously devoted another $60 billion to the war effort in the midst of widespread unemployment, and for good measure dropped a rider to the bill that would have extended unemployment benefits for over a million Americans, presumably on the theory that homelessness and starvation will be wonderful motivators. The final passage of a bill allowing gay Americans to serve openly in the military may very well be held up by the exclusion of funding for a jet engine the Department of Defense no longer wants. In a political climate that supposedly favors fiscal conservatism, the defense budget is fully 23% of federal spending on its own, and is held sacrosanct less anyone get the impression one was “weak on defense.”

Whether we understand and support our wars or not, people still die in them, and this day by rights belongs to them. It should be a day of thanks and simple patriotism. Unfortunately there is little that is simple about patriotism in America 2010. Patriotism, defined as 100% conformity to the political kitsch of the Bush administration as they lied us into a needless war and curtailed the individual liberties and human rights a lot of us thought our country stood for in the first place, was turned into a blunt political weapon long ago, with the love of country of anyone not in full agreement with the ruling regime subject to accusations of treason. President Obama’s failure to attend ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery today in favor of a rained-out ceremony and visiting wounded veterans in his home state of Illinois was taken up by the remains of this crowd today as a means of questioning his patriotism, as if the President were a national figurehead with strict ceremonial duties at national monuments, as if fallen soldiers in DC were more important than fallen soldiers in Illinois, as if their gross opportunism and flagrant disrespect didn’t sully the spirit of the day a thousand times more than the President’s actions ever could.

And the President, who many of us voted for based on the promise that he could clean up this mess, has done nothing of the kind, refusing to support even basic accountability for those responsible for gross violations of the Constitution, much less the reversal of their decisions,

We have a lot to mourn today. And a lot to organize tomorrow.

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

My emotions, such as they are, were remarkably mixed when I learned of NBC’s cancellation of the twenty year old Law and Order. Though a devoted fan from the start, it’s been years since the show fell off my DVR schedule, and despite NBC’s tendency to use the program to fill the numerous holes in its schedule post-Leno, I hadn’t watched any of this season’s episodes at all, and probably wouldn’t have watched next year’s, either. Though it was for much of its run one of the best weekly hours on television, L & O had over time metastasized (along with The Simpsons and SNL) into just one more bolus in an increasingly constipated culture, another blankie that the dominant Boomer demographic refused to let go of, a series of comforting cliches worn by repetition into the national consciousness.

And oh, what repetition. Anyone who’s been unemployed, convalescing, or otherwise involuntarily exposed to daytime television over the last decade or so can attest to the constant marathon of L&O reruns that blanket daytime cable programming. Add in the series’ franchised spin-offs--Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the short-lived Law and Order: Trial By Jury, as well as my own unproduced pilot script Law and Order: SUV (“In the criminal justice system, four wheel drive vehicle related offenses are considered especially heinous...”)-- and its influence on a slew of other crime procedurals and their spin offs and imitators, and what was once a paragon of television turned into a giant, gelatinous megatrope.

Still, it’s almost impossible to express just what a revelation the first few seasons of Law and Order were back in the early ’90’s. Showing up at the exhausted tail end of the Reagan/ Bush era and competing in a television schedule dominated by coziness (Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Father Dowling, In The Heat of the Night) and slickness (LA Law, thirtysomething, Macgyver), Law and Order was nothing short of startling. It was grimly New York, in stark contrast to the dominant sunshiny LA paradigm, and grimly realistic in comparison to the ridiculous Hollywood fantasies of most television writing before and since.

It was also impeccably produced and acted. The original cast, with George Dzundza, Chris Noth, Dann Florek, Steven Hill, Michael Moriarty, and Richard Brooks, and subsequent ringers Paul Sorvino, Sam Waterston, S. Epatha Merkerson, Jill Hennessy, and Jerry Orbach, made up one of the strongest acting ensembles in television history (though the ensemble nature of the show eventually drove off would be prima donnas Dzundza, Sorvino, and Moriarty), and they were supported by a veritable pantheon of American stage and screen character acting week after week. The stories were refreshingly street level, unsentimental and unglamorous, and often commented satirically on the days’ events.

It was, of course, too good to last. NBC network interference resulted in the sexing up and dumbing down of the cast and concept starting in the third season (which initially brought in the still superlative Hennessy and Merkerson), with a series of supermodel types eventually replacing Hennessy, Benjamin Bratt clomping around in the too-big shoes of Noth, and Steven Hill’s bracing New York Jewish irascibility replaced by the incongruous folksy Southern cracker barrel philosophizing of conservative icon Fred Thompson. As for the setting, it is telling that L&O’s replacement on next fall’s schedule is Law and Order: LA, a seeming final triumph of Hollywood hegemony over much of what was good and different about the original series.

Nothing lasts forever, and in some ways L&O didn’t last much longer than those first few seasons. Still, it will continue, both in its influence, its spin-offs, and those interminable reruns. News of a possible cable run for the unseen British spin-off Law and Order: UK (Jamie Bamber! Freema Agyeman!! Bill Paterson!!!) has even this lapsed fan a bit excited. Stay tuned...

Embarrassing but true. It started out innocently enough-- Ezra Klein linked a page in his WashPost blog, and I was required to join to read it-- and spiraled to the point where there is now a page for this blog. Oh, what we do for eyeballs...

“And it seem like
Total destruction
The only solution.”
-- Bob Marley

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light...”
-- Dylan Thomas

“We live in troubled times. But let’s give thanks that we avoided the era of the weasel testicles.”
-- Gail Collins, NYT, 5/8/10

There wasn’t any official declartion, but we nonetheless seem to have spent the last several days observing National Fatalism Week, with bad omens and dark clouds collecting on the edges of our cheery, positivist, celebrity-obsessed mainstream national culture and distracting us from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and Bret Michaels’ aneurysm.

Some of this, of course, is the normal background noise from the Shadow Ministry of Fear, a/k/a the conservative Republican establishment, which has spent the week encouraging people to wet themselves over terrorism (in the face of an unsuccessfully staged and successfully investigated truck bomb incident in New York that has been disavowed by the international terror networks they tried so hard to connect it to) and the rise in the unemployment rate (which accompanied the best job creation month in four years and should highlight once and for all what a vacuous statistic the unemployment rate really is). Most of it, though, derives from a series of events that could conceivably tip us into a situation that would make petty political pissing matches (continent or otherwise) utterly irrelevant.

As the Ministry was challenging our national continence, they were ignoring another continent entirely. Real economists spent the week observing the fiscal collapse of Greece, considering to what extent the interconnectedness of European Economic Community states might make this a crisis for the whole of Europe, and taking side bets as to which domino will fall next, with Spain and Portugal neck and neck at the clubhouse turn and Britain coming up fast. While most Americans either ignore “furriners” when they aren’t actively denigrating them or cheerily contemplate how much more their dollars will buy on that trip to France this summer, the inbred, capitalistically convenient “global economy” we’ve been putting together for the last thirty years means that an economic earthquake in the Euro zone could cause an economic tsunami here.

Furthermore, the system we have in place here spent part of last week showing that it’s perfectly capable of cacking over even without international assistance. Thursday’s 1,000 point interday crash in the Dow Jones Industrial average was the largest and swiftest in history, and the explanation that this was a “technical glitch” that the system eventually corrected shouldn’t comfort anyone. That “glitch” occurred in a highly automated trading system that is now so technologically advanced and interconnected-- another “financial innovation” brought to you by the same Wall Street interests who gave you derivatives trading and subprime lending-- that it can instantaneously toss trillions of dollars of market value down the shithole without any human intervention, foreign or domestic, required. This highlights two salient and rather scary facts about US markets: first, that they have become a vastly complicated game with a tenuous relationship at best to the real economy; and second, that the game is rigged to the advantage of the minority of players big enough to exploit those complications regardless of real economic and social fallout. The effects of a wave of international calamity on this rickety infrastructure are likely to be devastating.

Speaking of waves, the as of this morning unabated oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, quite apart from its effects on energy and environmental policy and politics, is almost certain to depress the economies of the Gulf Coast states, already one of the poorest regions of the country, with the already troubled regional tourism, seafood, shipping, and refining industries leading the spiral.

And, as Ezra Klein pointed out this week, this is just the stuff we know about. “Many people think China is in a housing bubble, and it could pop. Instability in the Middle East, or any of a number of other factors, could send the price of oil skyrocketing. A successful terrorist attack in America, or some sort of pandemic flu, or...” While this all adds shadows to an already scary picture, it should be noted that the vast majority of these calamities present and future are entirely of our own making. Anger is probably a more appropriate response than fear, and cold, unsentimental rationality probably a more appropriate response than either.

Here’s wishing you all a good week, and a quick and painless death.

It's absolutely fascinating watching the entire American media discussing the formation of a minority government in Britain with nary a mention of the fact that we had one in 2001-2005 (and arguably 2008).

I hope everyone had a happy International Workers Day. Let’s continue the celebration with a dance around the May polls...

I was away from the TV this morning-- kids trump research-- but would have been interested to see how the Sunday morning quarterbacks of the political chat shows dealt with just how lousy a week its been for the Beltway “mainstream” conventional wisdom that it their stock in trade. While it’s unlikely that the events of the week shifted the conversation completely-- contradictory evidence hasn’t affected some of these people’s arguments in years-- the events of the week have nonetheless turned some of last week’s foregone conclusions into open questions.

Two of last week’s walking dead, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Governor Charlie Crist (ex-R-FL)-- have turned up feeling much better, thank you. In Nevada, Reid’s presumed general election opponent, Republican primary front runner Sue “The Chicken Lady” Lowden, has parlayed a series of high profile statements on health care reform policy into the general impression that she is a complete moonbat and the near evaporation of her once prohibitive lead in the polls. Crist announced the above noted ex-R designation on Thursday in a near-KGO worthy speech decrying the broken political system and formally leaving the Republican Party and a primary in which he was likely to be creamed by tea-sipping challenger Marco Rubio for a run as an independent in the fall general election. In doing so, he lost most of his campaign staff and much of his current and future campaign war chest, gained a half way decent statistical chance of ending up as something other than a poster boy for the extremist-led purge currently at large in the Republican party, and spoiled all the cheerful talk of a Rubio walkaway in November. Whether or not this is good news for likely Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek is pretty much up to Kendrick Meek, give or take billionaire Jeff Greene’s sordid attempt to buy the Democratic nomination with money he made exploiting the Florida real estate bubble. Another foregone conclusion-- the triumph of Republican “drill, baby, drill” energy policy -- is set to start washing up on Gulf Coast beaches sometime this afternoon.

That last item should be enough to tip you off to the fact that this is all nothing like genuine good news. Politics does not trade in unmixed emotions, and whatever schadenfreude might be gained from watching the precious assumptions of the conservatives and the chattering class get trumped by cold reality has got to come tempered with just how cold that reality is at the moment. While it’s gratifying to see Sue Lowden, and through her the politics of squirrel’s ass craziness, take some comeuppance, her losses accrue to Harry Reid’s gain, and the replacement of Harry Reid as majority leader in the next Senate, provided it isn’t caused by a change in that majority is a consummation much to be wished by progressives everywhere. Nor is there any particular reason to give two shits about the political fate of Charlie Crist. A Rubio victory in November was only assured in the fantasies of the activist right, and if anything, Crist's presence on the general election ballot could prove as much a spoiler for Meek as for Rubio, and vastly reduces the chances of the hard right flame-out of the Rubio campaign some commentators (including this one) had anticipated later this year.

And that last one’s a doozy. “Drill, baby, drill” wouldn’t be much more than a bad political flashback if the Obama administration had not decided to barter away offshore drilling before negotiations on energy policy had even started. While I am glad that the administration has backed off that policy, it took the long term environmental degradation of the Gulf of Mexico to do it, and their resurrection of that particular corpse to no good end in the first place confirms the suspicion that what is good for the President and what is good for the country are two very different things.

Worse, all of this still comes filtered through the mainstream media narrative, meaning we are still talking about chickens and hugs and fund raising and slogans and PR instead of the real problems faced by the nation, and still talking about marginal differences in the appallingly high bullshit content of Beltway conventional wisdom instead of considering solutions to those problems.

I’m glad they’re wrong, but that doesn’t make it all right.

While America has been long overdue for an extended discussion on race, it is much to be hoped for all of our sakes that the recent “controversy” surrounding Arizona’s recently passed immigration law isn’t it. Any discussion that can accept as a premise that a blatantly unconstitutional and structurally racist piece of legislation could be even marginally acceptable, much less good policy, will probably not prove very enlightening, and such a discussion occurring in a country where support for the measure is running at 51 percent per the last Gallup poll even less so. Still, 51% in favor of the premise that substantial chunks of the Bill of Rights are simply bad ideas when applied to “those people” does count as news, and there is much worth discussing here, much of it oddly positive.

One bit of chipper news is that the perpetrators of this law-- Governor Jan Brewer, the Arizona Legislature, and the poor schmucks who voted for them-- are well and truly screwed. The sheer number of boycotts, which run from the nation of Mexico (which is responsible for 30% of Arizona export trade, and which recently issued a “travel alert” as a warning to Mexican citizens) to major US counties and municipalities canceling Arizona based contracts and banning funded travel to baseball fans swearing to boycott Diamondbacks games to truckers changing their routes to avoid transit through the state to a mistaken call for a boycott of Arizona Iced Tea (which is made in New York, and is no bad tea), pretty much ensure economic disaster for the state, with resultant political disaster for those at whom the fingers will be pointed. While some have argued that such boycotts punish the innocent and guilty alike, poll results indicating that 70% of Arizonans approve of the measure indicate that the innocent are few and far between out there, and that they might want to consider either citizen action or moving.

Another is that the issue has divided the supposedly resurgent Republican Party and conservative movement to the point that conquering them should no longer be considered outside the realm of possibility. Jeb Bush, Tea Party favorite and Republican fratricidist Marco Rubio (who could conceivably find himself cooling his heels in some rural Arizona county nick should the law prevail), Karl Rove, Tom Tancredo, and a slew of right wing lesser lights, commentators and bloggers, while not outrightly denouncing the bill in many cases, have acknowledged that it is heavy handed and unconstitutional (with John McCain, who is one step removed at this point from the political equivalent of fellating fat boys for bologna sandwiches, stating that the law was unconstitutional, and that he was sad about that, and that it was still a pretty good idea). Meanwhile Sarah Palin has come out strongly in favor, Tea Party candidates in state primaries have announced that they will introduce similar legislation if elected, and Howard Fineman of Newsweek describes the atmosphere among Congressional Republicans in DC (most of whom have been mum on the subject) as one of extreme terror.

This is, as Vice President Biden would have it, a big fucking deal. The narrative of the resurgent and eventually triumphant conservative Republicans is largely dependent on the image of conservative Republicans as a highly disciplined monolith of resistance drawing energy from the populist anger of “real Americans” as represented by the Tea Set. The cracks that have formed in that monolith after Friday are profound, and the fact that the populist anger of the far right is grounded in fear and hatred no longer deniable. While the law itself might well prove a dead issue, the battle lines formed around it are likely to be politically relevant for a long time to come.

“It’s a CHICKEN joke!”
-- Jo Anne Worley

“Is it the shoes? It’s gotta be the shoes.”
-- Spike Lee, for Nike

The ongrinding narrative that I warned about at the end of our last episode a little under a month ago seems to be working on the same grist a little under a month later-- the Republicans are in resurgence, say the political tale spinners, the Democrats and President in trouble, and We the People running on a particularly lean mix of anger and adrenaline. Such conclusions are, at this point, a little under a month less grossly premature. The predictive value of polls taken from a volatile electorate seven months before an election and before the candidate field is even established can safely be considered suspect. So too can be the conventional wisdom based on historical portent: “majorities shrink in off-year elections,” while grounded in history, might end up on the same dung heap as “no one has ever won the Presidency without winning the Ohio Primary.” It’s just too soon to know, and events between now and November are likely to be far more determinative than the extrapolation of current trends beyond their effective shelf lives.

What might prove more fruitful than this needless horse race speculation is a real examination of what a resurgent Republican party might actually do on a policy level. Evidence is sparse and internally contradictory. Republicans are effectively leaderless-- 2008 Presidential Candidate John McCain holds little sway and might not hold his Senate seat, and House and Senate Minority Leaders Boehner and McConnell both have problems with charisma and presentability-- and have offered little in terms of an actual program outside “hell no” and the clap-for-Tinkerbell economics of the factually bereft Ryan plan. While the entire party seems to be under orders to pander in any way possible to the Tea Party Movement, that is likely to change drastically after the Primary season, and who exactly the Tea Party Movement consists of and what they want seems even less defined than the Republican agenda. What exactly the Republicans actually want to do with, or to, the country is almost impossible to determine from their political behavior. Still, there has been some evidence in recent days to indicate that whatever the Republicans would do in power, it would likely be really, really weird.

While the health care repeal was backpedaled as soon as its fund raising potential began to wane, health care reform is still being used as a campaign issue out on the hustings. Nevada Republican Senate frontrunner Sue Lowden has tried to combine disdain for the already passed health care reform bill and respect for tried and true old fashioned Republican values by suggesting that people barter for health care. “"You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors."

More the Waltons than the Simpsons, indeed. Leaving aside the mind boggling impracticality of this as a health care proposal-- the live stock exchanges at clinics and hospitals, the truck loads of chickens that would be required for a serious illness, the mere fact that there aren’t enough chickens on the planet to cover the country’s annual health care spending-- there’s the little matter of how health care actually worked under those conditions. If we’re talking the bucolic, still largely rural America of 1900, the average life expectancy for a man was 48.3 years-- about two months older than I am right now. To put it charitably, this hardly counts as an outcomes based approach, and is much more interesting as an example the woeful knowledge base of a serious Republican candidate for the United States Senate than it is as a serious health care proposal, because it is in no way, shape or form a serious health care proposal. That it’s one of the few attempts at a proposal made by any Republican is more interesting still.

Immigration policy, always a touchstone of Republican racial politics, took its own little wahoo last week when Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R, of course) signed a law requiring Arizona peace officers to question the immigration status and check the documents of those they suspect might be in the country illegally. Exactly how they would make that determination remains an open question, with any answers not involving baldfaced racial stereotyping tending to rely instead on baldfaced cultural stereotyping, with Representative Dan Bilbray (R-CA) suggesting “non ethnic standards” based on choice of clothing, hairstyle, and footwear.

In this case, too, the actual policy is not the long term issue.This law, violating the legal prohibition against racial profiling, usurping Federal jurisdiction over immigration matters, and pissing off at very least the 30% of the state population that might now be subject to detention under it, is not likely to last, and stands more as a testament to the Arizona Legislature and Executive’s lack of knowledge of and respect for the legal system than as a serious approach to immigration. What they thought they were doing politically is an entirely different question. Obviously, pandering to the worst instincts of the Tea Party is a factor-- John McCain, for whom immigration was a signature issue, has endorsed this law in hopes of shutting Tea stained primary challenger JD Hayworth up on the matter-- but would hardly seem to make up for the humiliation and boycotts this action has resulted in. For the national party, during a week wherein rogue RNC Chairman Michael Steele confessed the open secret of the Southern Strategy, it represents the complete reversal of every attempt they’ve ever made at minority outreach and gives the Democrats impetus to defuse what Republicans were hoping would be a potent issue in the fall campaigns.

All of this brings up another question-- why exactly is a party that’s doing so badly on the one hand continuing to give the impression that they're doing so well on the other? And how long can it last?

MCCAIN/ PALIN, TOGETHER AGAIN: It was hard to see the look on John McCain’s face during his Friday campaign event with Sarah Palin and not feel, all politics aside, a bit of sympathy for the man. Standing behind the poorly vetted and ill-considered Vice Presidential nominee who helped sink his last-chance Presidential bid as she tied him to a political agenda that goes against much of what he has stood for in his public career, McCain face betrayed a mixture of pain, embarrassment and dread as he was visited, Scrooge-like, with a ghostly tableau of every bad political decision he’s made in the last two years. McCain, whose independent nature had formerly earned him a maverick reputation, a measure of respect from moderates in both parties, and his party’s Presidential nomination, was reduced to mugging in the background as a walking political inanity of his own devising helped him pander to a segment of his party that has never liked him and whom he has told to go to hell both literally and figuratively many times in the past.

Palin, dressed in a tight Emma Peel Does Sturgis biker jacket that suggested that her next television project might cast her as a motorcycle-riding bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic future, was there to deliver the blessing of the Tea Party movement and drive up both crowd numbers and media interest, and accomplished one out of three. While the media was there in force, whole sections of seating were roped off to make the crowd appear less sparse to them, and many of those in attendance made no bones about the fact that they were there for Palin and were likely to vote for McCain’s opponent J.D. Hayworth in the primary. As for the Tea Party benediction, it is simply not Palin’s to give, her mercenary attitude and constant exhortation for the movement to align itself with the Republican Party having already alienated large segments of the movement for which she is supposedly speaking. Her appearance on behalf of McCain, who is roundly considered a RINO by the Tea Party hard core, probably alienated more.

Meanwhile, the political program McCain is now yoked to-- “zero cooperation,” the statistically impossible fund raising scam that is health care repeal, and the “Party of Hell No”-- all but has this candidate, who has successfully run on independence and political effectiveness for decades, running on a program of enforced political irrelevance, and only running seven points ahead of his primary challenger. The irrelevance part was duly noted by the crowd and media his former running mate had attracted to the event, both of which departed in droves after her speech and before his.

REPUBLICANS ARE VICTIMS TOO: Of course, if Sarah Palin had been 100% successful in bestowing the Tea Party blessing on McCain, she would have been tying him to a movement that in recent days has become associated with vandalism, intimidation, and threats of violence. Palin, whose “Don’t Retreat, instead--RELOAD!” Twitter comment and rifle crosshairs graphic for “targeted” Democratic Congressional candidates served as examples of the form, denounced the mass shock inspired by opposition behavior as a “ginned up” controversy from the “lamestream media.”

Her comments were but a milder version of those of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-MD), who parlayed a random bullet that landed a few inches into a disused part of his unmarked campaign office and the millennia of oppression of his people into a denunciation of Democrats for “fanning the flames” and using threats of violence for political advantage, presumably by reporting them to the authorities. While it’s true that threats are a routine part of public life-- hell, I used to get them as a small market newspaper columnist-- and probably equally true that Cantor receives some from time to time, the sheer volume of threats in the last week and the boost to their credibility given them by the accompanying property crime are hardly routine. Cantor’s willingness to include himself among its victims, albeit through completely specious evidence, only lends it further credence even while trying to denounce it.

Those who see the falseness of Cantor’s evidence and the ridiculousness of his arguments as the point of the story are missing the point Cantor very successfully addressed. Something bigger than the lives of politicians and the windows of their offices was threatened by this story-- the false moral equivalence without which the Republican party and the controversy-exploiting mainstream media could not operate. With Eric Cantor numbering himself among the victims, however falsely, it has been restored, and the narrative grinds on.

" What is it that these Evolutionaries want?"
-- Glenn Beck, 3/24/10

To evolve, you pathetic piece of coke trash. To evolve.

A New School KGO to our most esteemed Publican for not only recognizing domestic terrorism when he sees it, but for recognizing that America might stand a chance to regain its ideals. Selah, old friend. As usual, the man speaks for himself...

“If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.--Senator Jim Demint (R-SC)

“So how could I ever refuse?
I feel like I win when I lose...”
--Abba

As diverting a spectacle as the historic passage of what a rather timid majority party thought it could get away with in terms of health care reform has been, there’s been another and somewhat more interesting show on the other side of the aisle. The Republicans, having failed utterly in their campaign to “kill the bill” through bad faith, fear mongering, disinformation, and the riling of the yahoos, are taking an odd kind of victory lap, are insisting that this passage will start of a wave of resurgent conservative Republicanism that they will gleefully surf back to the sweet revenge of a congressional majority in 2010 and the White House in 2012. Luckily enough, a bigger collection of hodads you’ve never seen....

The bill, they insist, is deeply unpopular, and was arrogantly passed by the Democrats in the face of widespread public opposition. "Shame on each and every one of you who substitute your will and your desires for those of your constituents," yelled House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), during an angry rant on the House floor that ignored both the tenets of congressional decorum and a few terribly inconvenient facts. It is demonstrably true that the bill as passed completely ignored the will of a majority of Americans--specifically, the large majority who wanted a Republican blocked public option included. It is also true that a majority of those polled opposed passage. A breakdown of the numbers, though, indicates strong support for most elements of the bill when they were presented individually, and that a large enough chunk of that majority opposed the bill on the grounds that it was not sufficiently liberal to leave the Republicans with the same forty odd percent support that cost them the last couple of elections. One also has to wonder how many Americans opposed the bill because they were just fucking sick to death of it.

Still, Republicans have always favored anecdotes over statistics, and were lucky enough to have several thousand walking anecdotes in opposition to the bill in the Capitol and on the grounds during this last set of votes in the form of Tea Party protestors. Unfortunately for them, these “real Americans” mostly presented anecdotal evidence that they were against the bill because it was supported by niggers and faggots. Cue the banjos...

Having failed to keep the bill from passing, Republicans will now concentrate their efforts on its repeal-- a Club for Growth repeal pledge has already gained the signature of over 200 2010 Republican congressional candidates. So seriously do they take this effort that it is being spearheaded by... Representatives Michelle Bachman (R-MN) and Steve King (R-IA), a team that brings to mind the Children’s Crusade.

For the moment, at least, the Republican agenda for 2010 was best summed up this weekend by Senator and former Republican ticket head John McCain (R-AZ), who pledged an immediate repeal effort and a program of “no cooperation” from congressional Republicans for the rest of the year. Even given the statistical impossibility of a veto-proof repeal and the utter lack of congressional cooperation on the part of Republicans since Obama’s inauguration, this was still considered news-- mostly by Republicans.

The obvious problem with this agenda, along with the problems described above, is that it constitutes a major bet on the attention span of the American electorate. With the health care reform effort no longer sucking all the oxygen out of the political culture, it is inevitable that a number of issues that have been smoldering for the last year will burst into flame-- like it or not, the subject will be changed. Still, as a concerned American, I can’t help but wish the Republicans luck and express the fervent hope that they are every bit as successful in this year’s election cycle as they were in the last two. Catch that wave, y’all, and wave bye-bye...

"FOX....KIDS...
ROCKS KIDS!"
-- Fox Network Saturday morning cartoon promo

"FOX...NEWS...
FUCKS NEWS!"
-- Me

When President Obama agreed to be interviewed on Fox News, much was made of the distinction between Fox’s news division, which would be handling the interview, and their opinion division, which has accused the President of treason and worse on a regular basis since the ’08 campaign. It was largely a distinction without a difference-- the “news division” also includes the whacky morning news combo of Carlson, Doocy, and Kilmeade-- and after tonight a distinction not even the staunchest defender of Fox’s status as a legitimate news organization will be able to make in sane company. It was presumed that what the news division would deliver would be an interview with the President of the United States. What it delivered instead was the most egregious display of disrespect visited on any public figure in recent memory.

Which, of course, dovetails nicely with the opinion division’s mission of delegitimizing President Obama by any means necessary. Fox’s Bret Baier interrupted the President in the middle of most of his answers, and while this would not be an inappropriate interview style if the interruptions genuinely framed the question or attempted to draw out more information on a point glossed over, Baier’s were dismissive (Fox News’ 18,000 solicited emails were from “real people,” while the 40,000 Obama gets a day were “Washington pundintry(sic)”), condescending (“This is one sixth of the US economy, though, sir...one sixth...”), and impertinent (“I know you don’t like to filibuster...”), and, as Baier admitted when he interrupted the President one last time to apologize for interrupting him so often, designed to elicit gotchas and sound bites (“I was trying to get the most for our buck, here...”).

While I am not one to stand on ceremony, Baier’s treatment of Obama didn’t merely fail to accord him deference and respect-- it failed to accord him common courtesy, with the implication that it really didn’t have to.

Tomorrow, of course, the media will breathlessly report the “controversy” (there’s already a You Tube clip entitled “Obama’s Contentious Fox News Interview”), Baier’s attempted sound bites will hit heavy rotation, and the narrative will grind on.

"Some are fancy on the outside,
Some are fancy on the inside
Every body's fancy, every body's fine
You're body's fancy
And so is mine."
-- Fred Rogers

"In any case, this is an inadequate description of the sweetmeat."
-- Monty Python, "Crunchy Frog" sketch

"LADY PARTS": What’s with the cutesy shit? This silly and infantilising euphamism for female genitalia has lately been taken up by people in the media who seem otherwise neither silly nor infantile, including, oddly enough, Rachel Maddow. Back in the Golden Age of PC, referring to women as ladies could get you a good public scolding-- even the spell checker on this laptop advises me against it--so it’s a little weird to hear the term used however ironically by otherwise stalwart feminists. While it’s an improvement on the Oprah Winfrey coined “vajayjay,” it seems to be some weird linguistic headblend of baby talk and Victorian English, somewhere on the spectrum between “tinky” and “waterworks” with a strong undertone of “ooh, ick.” The Curmudgeon suggests that it represents a kind of social breakthrough that we’re acknowledging the existence of vaginae in the first place, and I have to agree--let a thousand vaginae bloom--but its difficult to handle such topics in an adult manner using a term that connotes such embarrassment and concealment.

Americans, of course, have an almost unique inability to deal with the realities of sex and sexuality in an adult manner in the first place-- embarrassment and concealment are what we do well instead--and this inability shows in our public health statistics, our crime rates, our social interactions, and our politics, as well as our garden variety sexism and homophobia. There are dozens of terms, both Latinate and Anglo-Saxon, to choose from. Could we please pick a different one?

"THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKETPLACE": Would that be the invisible hand that kept the banks from failing? No? How about the one that keeps insurance rates low? No, wait--they're sky high and climbing, that can’t be it. The invisible hand that’s bringing unemployment down to acceptable levels? Help me, here...

Listen--please don’t ask me to trust in a supernatural anything, or in the honesty of its practitioners, in situations involving humanitarian crises. Ever.

"BIPARTISANSHIP": See also Centrist and Moderate. From the obscure Beltway dialect of American English, see also Russertese. The bane of the American politics and political commentary, meaning, for the last year at least, pretending that elections mean nothing.

Listen--it is not important that our elected officials reach across the aisle. It is important that they govern, honestly, fairly, decently, and in good faith. The less time they spend thinking about the former, the more they can spend on the latter.

“...So all I can say is, keep some sunshine on yo’ face.”
-- Richard Pryor

“Life is short and life is shit and soon it will be over.”
-- The Kids in the Hall

It’s a good morning to be on the porch, the first in many a wintery moon, with temperatures edging into the fifties and hardly any snow in sight. Too good to last, most likely-- freezing precipitation is a fact of life here in the north country as late as April-- but as long as it’s here, another cup of coffee sounds like a very good idea.

The first passably decent day in the fifties, however ephemeral it proves to be, sets something palpably loose in the Minnesota metabolism, the first indications of life without winter coats and extra blankets and the windows closed relaxing the muscles we’ve been clenching against the cold for so long. Any decent society would be planning a bacchanal under the circumstances. Up here, it might’ve been a good day for beer sales if they sold beer on Sunday.

When I lived in Iowa City there was a similar sort of time, usually a few weeks earlier in the year, when the ice broke up on the Iowa River and started heading for the spillways, a time I always thought of as the Breaking Days. Whether anyone else ever thought of it that way or not is almost irrelevant. Like so many things in Iowa City, the Breaking Days was a spontaneous occurrence free from sanction and its trappings, the magnetic pull of the suddenly flowing river pulling us down to the banks and bridges with our coats loose to watch the winter end. Each year, some poor schmuck would spontaneously elect himself the unofficial fool of the celebration, riding an ice floe helplessly down the river like some apocryphal Eskimo exile. They were good days, everyone smiling except for that guy.

There are too few days like that. Days ahead will certainly be warmer, longer, sweeter, but today is the first day in far too many that we’ve had any evidence of that and can actually allow ourselves to believe that it’s even possible, and maybe even allow ourselves another cup of coffee on the porch.

As amusing as the discovery of the Republican National Committee finance leadership meeting PowerPoint has been for the last couple of days, there’s really nothing about it that could be considered surprising. RNC fundraisers hold those who would donate to their party in complete contempt—well hell, who doesn’t? They seek to exploit fear to attain their ends—well, duh, they’re Republicans. They openly trade access for large donations, that is, peddle influence—yup, sounds like politics to me.

So, no, the contents of the presentation weren’t so surprising. What did surprise me was my reaction to it, specifically to the question “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate?” While its hardly a shock that the nexus of commerce and politics—what they used to refer to as “corruption” back when I was a lad—is more or less complete at this juncture, I had never really spent much time thinking of politics in terms of salesmanship before.

Salesmanship, the thing that sits a steak hungry nation down to a big, heaping plate of sizzle, changes everything. Suddenly, Republicans aren’t lying, really-- they’re being positive and confident about their product. That product is suddenly equivalent to a copper bracelet for arthritis pain or a ”natural male enhancement capsule” or a time share condo or a miracle absorbent cloth.


Mind you, confidence is the word from which we derive “con game,” sizzle isn’t particularly nutritious, and none of that shit works especially well. But sympathy for suckers is misplaced. In the sexist and anachronistic words of W.C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. If this stuff is selling like gangbusters, the hucksters doing the selling are only half the story.

Happy news for Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday in the form of a Washington Post article (one of a series of recent hagiographies) offering the theory that if only the President listened more to this “force of political reason,” he’d be having an easier time of it politically. Emanuel, it is said, is largely ignored in favor of cultish Obamaists like Jarrett and Axelrod, but nonetheless bravely catches flak for the White House as a whole.

Heady stuff, to be sure, though Emanuel himself is said to be embarrassed by the attention (gosh, all that and humble too) and trying to avoid escalating internal conflicts. Sad, then, that I have to point out that these attempts to cast Emanuel not as a problem but as an unheeded solution come off as fairly typical products of Beltway mainstream media, larded with such choice cuts from the centrism’s greatest hits collection such as “going for the perfect at the expense of the plausible,” utterly dismissive of Progressives and the progressive agenda, and possessed of a fairly high horse shit content.

For starters, exactly what Obama initiative thus far introduced to Congress has constituted “the perfect”? The diluted stimulus package? The health care reform package that omitted even the slightest mention of the benefits of a single payer plan? In truth, just about everything that has made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hill seems to have been designed with an eye towards politics over policy, a distinction made in the Post yesterday by Ezra Klein as a handy means of introducing a bit of reality into the discussion, and has seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it.

Klein doesn't quite take it far enough, however. While Klein points out that health care reform would have passed long since were it not for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he fails to point out the degree to which that election exemplified ineptitude in the White House political operation-- Emanuel's bailiwick and supposed area of expertise.

While Emanuel was brought into the Administration as an experienced political hand with a unique understanding of Congress, his experience consists of time among the madly triangulating Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House and his years as a northern Blue Dog in the House. Thus it is completely lost on him that a rather large portion of the decline in Obama's political capital has occurred not on the right, where Emanuel's political operation has been aiming its pitches, but on the left, among the people the Chief of Staff has characterized as "fucking retards." Emanuel is of a generation of Democrats who came of age in the Reagan/Bush hegemony and has been trained, Pavlov-style, to bark wildly at liberals and to assume the position and pucker up whenever a bell goes off in the conservative echo chamber. In this way, Obama's supposed pit bull has shown himself to be a very good doggie indeed, and this latest collection of media biscuits proves the point nicely.

I’ve always tried to avoid the habit of talking to the television screen as if the people on it could actually hear you, a habit that both my father and grandmother indulged in incessantly, and were roundly teased for, when I was growing up. I was thus somewhat surprised this morning to find myself yelling “Who could possibly give a shit?” and “You dumb son of a bitch, what the hell are you thinking?” at David Shuster this morning.

I usually watch the MSNBC and CNN morning news over breakfast, flipping from one to the other to avoid the incessant commercials, and was doing so this morning when I saw the aforementioned Shuster end an otherwise productive interview with former DNC Chair Howard Dean by asking him what his advice would be to Tiger Woods. “Goddamn,” I thought. “What the hell?” I wouldn’t have been more flabbergasted if he’d asked Dr. Dean “If you could be any kind of animal, what animal would you be?”

Deciding to fortify my somewhat shaken brain with another cup of coffee and a Pall Mall on the porch, I returned to the television just in time to hear Shuster conclude his interview with his next guest with the same question. I then made like Dad and Granny for the next several minutes.

Both MSNBC and CNN proceeded to spend what bits of the rest of the morning not taken up with Tiger Woods’ fourteen minute apology to one and all with analysis of same. As usual when I’m watching TV news, I was much less interested in the questions they were considering than on the one they weren’t, which was this: What exactly makes any of this any of our goddamn business, much less a major news story? Role model, my ass—Tiger Woods is a personable if fallible young man who is very good at playing what I consider to be a particularly silly game. If, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, he had made his career criticizing and attempting to legislate the morality of others, I might actually see the point of bringing up his personal life. Instead, he makes his living hitting a little white ball with a collection of sticks, and I really don’t. In a country in crisis that is fairly brimming with under reported news stories, I marvel at the amount of time and attention wasted on it.

And yes, I know that my recent media kick is starting to resemble Fish shooting at a barrel, and is bringing me dangerously close to qualifying for my own old school KGO award, but jeez, people….

"Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left."
-- Ezra Klein, Washington Post 2/15/10

Senator Evan Bayh (Vichy D-IN) resigned suddenly yesterday, provoking a rain of bullshit that has resulted in visibility zero conditions in the political media. Bayh, who is probably the most conservative Democrat currently serving in the Senate, is characterized as a "moderate" and a "centrist" who is leaving because of his frustrations with Senate partisanship, giving the dual examples of the seven Senate Republicans who voted against the deficit commission and Harry Reid's scuttling of the bipartisan Baucus/Grassley jobs bill. Democrats, per the media, are stunned, and Republicans looking forward to taking his seat in the fall.

No time, of course, with all this news breaking to wonder whether or not the deficit commission and Baucus/Grassley bill are anything like an appropriate response to the current economic situation, or to wonder how exactly anyone will be able to tell the difference if a genuine Republican took Bayh's place, or to delve any deeper into the origins of Senate gridlock in the Republican strategy of reflexively voting against any and all Democratic initiatives. One typical attempt this morning: MSNBC's Contessa Brewer interviewing Senator Judd Gregg on the topic with nary a mention of his authorship of a widely circulated memo explaining in detail the tactics Senate Republicans could use to obstruct and delay health care reform.

Why bother with facts when you can further narratives? The Horse Race narrative (are Obama and the Dems in trouble?), the antipartisanship narrative (how dare those Democrats try to govern?), and the centrist meme (how bad can things be if a "moderate" like Bayh is bailing out?) are being ram-fed in joyous anticipation of the high drama and boffo ratings of "stunning upsets" in November. Self fulfilling prophecies anyone?

Perfected at last-- news that actually makes you stupider as you watch.

"But if logic wouldn't work
Neither would a magic wand..."
-- Phoebe Snow

Old friendships can pay off in big ways, as I was reminded of again last Thursday when one of my oldest dropped me a line that managed to sum up neatly some of the things that had been rattling around my brain lately. The Turk, who claims to be apolitical but sometimes can't seem to help himself, sent me a Bernie Sanders video and the following: "Suddenly the GOP are all anti-deficit again. Our whole political discourse, if it can be called that, seems to revolve around amnesia. Everything would be so different if the media and its consumers remembered basic stuff dating back as far as, oh let's say three years."

And selah. Notably lacking from the current discussion of the opposition's macroeconomically idiotic anti-deficit mania is the fact ("stupid things," per conservative icon Ronald Reagan) that deficit increases over the last thirty years have occurred preponderantly under Republican administrations, and that they've been in all cases whoppers. The Republicans have practiced a tax cut and spend anyway philosophy as a cornerstone of their something for nothing electoral strategy and their revised standard Clap For Tinkerbell economics.

Selah as well to the media reference. When it is considered news that Senator X said something, but not news that his utterance was stone cold chapter and verse counterfactual, reason itself goes begging.

"It's going to be a great year for Republicans," said David Brooks on this Sunday's Press the Meat, and if he's right, a lot of the reason for it is right there.

My advice to young people has always been this-- if you meet someone, even someone who seems otherwise attractive, whose favorite author is J.D. Salinger or Ayn Rand, leave that person's presence with all possible speed, screaming optional. Salinger's death at the age of 91 Wednesday does nothing to change this.

While his work as a narrative stylist is somewhat interesting before the subject matter drives this reader off the page, Salinger's celebration of stunted adolescence, particularly in the excruciating The Catcher In The Rye, has been a woeful cultural influence, contributing to, among other imitations and homages, Mark David Chapman, the twee quality that makes Wes Anderson's movies so difficult to watch, the movie "Purple Haze", and, arguably, the smug, entitled something for nothing ethos at the heart of modern conservatism (Dennis Miller's son's name? Why, Holden, of course).

Salinger, apparently, wrote what he knew, managing to spend his entire later career at the writerly equivalent playing the piano "in the goddamn closet", allegedly producing reams of material that he considered too precious to be put out into the nasty, phony world and parlaying his status as a recluse into a cult following that probably wouldn't have survived continued publication.

Some of this later work is likely to be released by his estate. Keep your eyes peeled for people who are excited by this prospect, and avoid those people.

UPDATE: I was talking with the lovely Em last night, who told me that when she was in high school she had avoided reading The Catcher In The Rye because it was popular and because it was expected of her, and hadn't read it to this day. Never having read it, she missed the irony inherent in her attitude towards it, but organic irony is the best kind.

Watch politics for long enough, and the writing on the wall gets exceedingly easy to read. I came up from making breakfast for my sons on Sunday morning to find my youngest channel surfing past one of the Sunday morning network meme-fests, and in that mere snippet caught a sufficient whiff of doom to last me the rest of the day. David Gergen, whose experience in Republican Administrations and as a consultant to the Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House makes him a walking, talking symbol of the beltway ideal of centrist bipartisanship, managed to get one sentence off before being cut off on the way up to the Cartoon Network, to the effect that the President needs to concentrate on "jobs and the deficit."

Great, I though, politics by oxymoron-- all the President needs to do is bring down unemployment while reducing spending in an economy that is currently relying on stimulative Federal spending for what little growth its achieving. Piece of cake.

My first reaction to the Brown election last week was "if they try to triangulate to this sucker, we are well and truly doomed," and less than a week later, we well and truly are. In the run up to the State of the Union address tomorrow, it has been announced that the central elements of the President's economic agenda will be middle class tax cuts and a domestic spending freeze that excludes the Pentagon, the State Department, and any other cuts that might set the Republicans off. Engraved invitations for a recessionary double dip are presumably on order.

Stay tuned...

"... That is, we knew ye,
But I would have to say, hardly..."
-- Jackie Rogers Jr. (Martin Short), SCTV

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse..."
-- Bruce Springsteen

The voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts last night gave Barack Obama a rather interesting present in commemoration of this, the first anniversary of his inauguration. Happy Anniversary, Mister President: I hope you like suck…

The upset victory of the Republican candidate in the Massachusetts special election is, as commemorative gifts go, oddly fitting. Martha Coakley, the losing Democrat, was considered a shoe-in going in to this race, largely for reasons of sentiment and “history” (this is, after all, the fabled Kennedy Seat), and campaigned accordingly, taking a nice long vacation in the Caribbean over the holidays and committing gaffe after gaffe due to simple inattention. By the time her campaign woke up to the fact that they were about to have their asses handed to them and sought White House coat tails, it was far too late to make a difference. In the end, Democrats tried to make the race less a vote on Coakley (who had already lost it) than a referendum on the continuation of the Obama agenda in Congress.

The results speak for themselves, and make for an interesting summation of the first year of the Obama Presidency. The sixty vote super majority, which a vote for Coakley would supposedly have protected, has for all practical purposes been nothing but an empty numerical boast (paging Senators Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, and company), and the health care reform effort, which the election of Scott Brown supposedly dooms, emerged from the Senate a compromised botch that failed to address the real needs of real citizens. Sentiment and history—the President’s personal popularity, his status as the first African-American President, his effort to “win one for Teddy” by passing “historic” health reform—have been a lot of what this Presidency has been about so far. It hasn’t worked very well for him, either.

A couple of propositions to ponder seriously as we enter the new year:

1) The Republican Party's contribution to every political debate for the last year or more has consisted of equal parts zilch, nada, bupkis, and kvetch, leavened with constant and abiding bad faith, and that is unlikely to change. As such, the Republican Party is, despite their continued presence in the media, for all intents and purposes irrelevant to the current political debate.

2) Given proposition 1 above, the main impediment to the progressive agenda is not the Republican Party-- it is the Democrats.

Those who accept the propositions above (and I'm far too old to believe that includes everyone) might wish to entertain the ensuing modest proposal: that this should be the year that progressives undertake and act upon an honest, comprehensive examination of their relationship with the Democratic Party on the grounds that if such a relationship were happening between, for instance, a couple in the apartment upstairs, the cops would have been called long since.

As abusive relationships go, this has been a doozy. The left has for generations provided the Democratic Party with its activist base. It has also for the last thirty years at least provided them with the first bargaining chips off the stack in negotiation after negotiation. On issue after issue, progressive interests and nominees have been sold down the river in the name of compromise and bipartisanship, often to no good end.

They have done so in the full expectation of continued progressive support, and have for the most part received it. The last time that expectation was questioned, during Ralph Nader’s 2000 run for President, resulted in howls of protest from the Gore campaign and the Party establishment that resound to this day and a sort of post-Nader guilt on the left that has impeded any further attempts to break away from the Party. (By the way, those who have spent the last decade warming themselves on daydreams of the never-was Gore Administration are cordially invited to the following cringe: January 20th as the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Joe Lieberman.)

The assumption at the time was that it was the responsibility of progressive voters to deliver their votes to the Democrats, rather than the Democrats’ responsibility to actually be deserving of that support. It is an assumption that continues, and one progressives should question, especially in light of the last year.

The health care reform effort, while only the most recent example of the skewed relationship between the Democrats and the left, is nonetheless an excellent one—progressive ideas such as single payer (still the best means of controlling costs and providing universal coverage) were compromised from the get-go, with those compromises themselves eroded into nothing over time, not to win the support of Republicans, but to ensure the support of Democrats. Other examples abound: the expansion of the Afghanistan action, the President's refusal to hold the past Administration accountable for unlawful conduct and the subsequent embrace of that same unlawful conduct by his own Administration, the "economic rescue" that enriched entrenched business interests at taxpayer expense. The next year is likely to bring more: compromises on global warming policy, fiscal policy, and the still unfinished health care bill are all likely to begin with the wholesale rejection of progressive principles and end with a series of half-measures, band-aids, and excuses, all devised by the Democratic Caucuses and White House without a shred of substantive Republican input.

Through it all, the Democrats will solicit progressive campaign funding, volunteer hours, votes, advocacy support and, inevitably, continued forbearance. Maybe this time, they shouldn't get it.

This is obviously much easier said than done. The progressive left is hardly a monolithic entity, atomized as it has been by years of single issue and identity politics, and I truly have no answer to the age old question of where else progressives can be applied. I do, however, know this: with the Republicans devoid of any real political content beyond reflexive ideology and reactive opposition, and with the Tea Party movement splintering them electorally, a threatened defection, or even resignation, on the left from the Democratic Party could conceivably reshape the corporatized, status quotidian two party system that has presided over our national decline for the better.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, maybe before we get hit on the head this next time we should think long and hard about who's hitting us. The enemies of our enemies are not only not necessarily our friends; they lately seem to have gotten pretty cozy with our enemies.

"It's. . .
Colder than the nipple on the witch's tit!
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!
Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!"
-- Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow

Warning in advance-- I am likely to be in a shitty mood for the next little while. Luckily, I will be joined in this by many of my fellow Minnesotans. While everyone over the age of six is familiar with that let down feeling at the end of the holidays, here in the Precious Land of the Ever So Special January 2nd hits like an anvil pitched off a cliff and bounces around alarmingly until at least late March. It's not the end of the world, but you can definitely see it from here-- the snows of our coveted white Christmas compacted into glacial bits of road filth and frozen slush, no sanctioned celebrations on tap until Valentine's Day (Martin Luther King Day being, for most people, one of those weird Monday holidays that has as much to do with Dr. King and civil rights as Labor Day has to do with the working class), which tends to piss off as many people as it pleases, and the cozy feeling of being indoors away from the arctic air masses starting to show the first signs of congealing into terminal cabin fever.

Looking on the bright side under such conditions is both difficult and tedious, especially in a state culture that celebrates Lent without Mardi Gras, but strive we must. There are good things about a Minneapolis winter-- hockey, a number of good curry houses and Szechuan restaurants, Phillips Sno Shoe Grog, an excuse to share body heat if such an excuse is needed. The trick is to get to those good things without spending too much time outdoors. Should we live so long (four months? five?), we will eventually emerge into that day when the last of the ice melts and the lilacs start to bloom. In the meantime, you'll forgive us if we seem a little testy-- we're not unfeeling, just a bit numb at the extremities.

The Republicans are scared yet again. The unsuccessful attempt by a London educated, Al Qaeda trained young Nigerian to detonate a crotchload of plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit on Christmas day has dominated news coverage for the last week, largely because it has been seized on by conservative politicians and commentators keen on bringing back the War on Terror as an issue for the 2010 midterms and (with al Qaeda’s implicit cooperation—it will take more attacks to keep this going) the 2012 Presidential race, and threatens to dominate political debate and the legislative agenda for at least the first part of the coming year. While Janet Napolitano’s assertion that “the system worked” in the attempted Northwest Flight 253 attack was flatfooted and clumsy, the fact remains that, whether because of the valiant effort of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fellow passengers, his own incompetence, or the gimcrack nature of his underpants and syringe bomb, there was no explosion and no harm came to the flight, its passengers, or the airport facility. Unfortunately for us, no political hay can be made from a counting of blessings and a sigh of relief that the attack was unsuccessful.

In point of fact, little political hay can be from this situation at all without a sort of white knuckled, adrenalized suspension of the sense of perspective that the Republicans have been advocating since Christmas Day. Historical perspective, of course, absolutely must go—whether the system worked or not, it is a system that was largely designed and implemented by the previous administration, who embarrassingly enough seem to have released the main leaders of the conspiracy from custody. For all the use of the word “unprecedented” in Republican talking points over the last week, the Richard Reid shoe bomb incident back in 2001 provides an apt basis for comparison, and turns to solid horseshit just about every criticism made thus far concerning the Administration’s reaction to the incident: that reaction, to the extent that it wasn’t triangulated to blunt right wing criticism, was both more prompt and more thoughtful than the Bush Administration’s after Reid. In essence, conservatives have chosen to criticize the President for not making a bigger deal of this, for not going on immediate high alert and issuing statements before the facts were in, for not responding with posturing and tough talk and “enhanced interrogation” and other grand displays of pointless activity. The danger, it seems, is that the Administration, and by extension the American people, just aren’t acting scared enough in the face of The Enemy.

Again, it should be pointed out that The Enemy failed every bit as badly as the system did, and a response commensurate to such a bungled attack probably shouldn’t include military high alerts and declarations of new war fronts. The Obama Administration’s decision to treat the attack as a criminal matter is neither unprecedented nor historically unsuccessful, and if left at that, would probably address the incident and its implications fairly completely.

It is, unfortunately, very unlikely to be left at that, and some of the postures and pointless activities the right has been exhorting for have already begun. We have already seen an attempt to respond to the incident with a new level of airline security theater, including new guidelines about passenger behavior that have already been rejected as unweildy and a call for more stringent use of both watch lists, scanner technologies, and searches that will probably turn out to be both outrageously expensive and an immense pain in the ass for the flying public. The time and attention of both the Congress and the Executive Branch are likely to be taken up with hearings, investigations, and attempted fixes on this issue for some time to come, conveniently distracting it from a long list of domestic priorities the right would rather not have to address. And the disruption of our society and our government, the implied aim of all terrorist attacks successful or not, will, as usual, be accomplished far more by the fearmongering of the candy ass opposition than by, in this case, the hapless young African with the burnt genitals.

Worse, the fantasy that there is such a thing as complete safety and that it is the government’s job to pursue and provide it for us will be perpetuated, to the detriment of dozens of other displaced priorities. A country that might have used the historical marker of a change in decade for a reasoned assessment of its situation will likely be spending the next little while with its leaders on an extended visit to the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Happy bloody New Year indeed.

***
While we’re handing out New Year’s greetings, here, belatedly, is mine to you. Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on this blog over the last year, and special big wet ones to those few of you who followed me here from other locations and other media. I’m especially grateful to all of you because despite the many strides that have been made in information technology in the last decade, a Google search of “EC Fish” will still get you thousands of entries about seafood and aquaculture in the European Community before the first mention of me. Thus your presence on this page is the result either of a happy accident, and bless those, or a concerted effort, and bless you. I hope that you can spend the year having fun with people you love, because in the final analysis, there’s hardly anything else worth having. Hang in there, y'all, and stay tuned...