I blog pseudonymously so I can keep using the word bullshit

You never know what sanctions you'll suffer for your opinions or for your language.

Also, too, I can still say fuck. These insane teabagger days, the ability to say fuck without being punished for it in real life is pretty helpful to my continued insouciance in the face of conserfative infestations and the general inability of our politics and our press to deal with evidence.

Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

The last piastre

Emboldened by the prospect that SOPA will pass and bring with it copyright vigilantism, the Grey Lady is ready to make us all pay:

(Aside: Is anyone considering anti-trust proceedings? The dead tree media suddenly and coincidentally all got serious at once about squeezing some piastres out of their freeloading Internet readers.)

The Times hints condescendingly that it might restore actual fealty to facts in favor of its current wingnut-fearing neutral view of bullshit and the faux balance that results. (Although, isn't a blogger pretty much the definition of truth vigilante?) But then Jill Abramson defensively quashes that hint much more swiftly than any reporting error.

We foolish readers misunderstood!

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

At least the condescension is consistent.

If the Times doesn't demand a factual basis for the dialog in its pages, it fails utterly to do journalism. Maybe its editors don't care about that, but they should care that reality-based, skeptical reporting is the only function they have that can't be performed more cheaply and almost always better on the Internet.

Maybe they're just going to shut down every blog that links to them, once SOPA passes. That would be a whole different kind of truth vigilante. Still...

Romney lies, you can see it in his eyes.

A good paragraph

Some writing deserves to be blogged just because of what it does:

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

Vain to ask, What if?  But also compelling, as with the Kennedys and King and Joplin and Hendrix and Challenger and Columbia and Grissom and the girl I loved but never spoke of it to.  And...

Marginalized

It's true that so-called progress is not an unalloyed good.  There is something gratifying about a bound paper book, and those will become rare specialty items and nostalgia pieces.

But marginalia are not vanishing - my Kindle can add notes.  Other chances to comment on a writer's work are vastly increasing.  The Internet's not bound in leather, but it's everywhere, and everyone can comment.

Maybe it's democratization that the scolds are worried about.  (And they have some reason to be.)

Great social and political import

Random observations at the supermarket (does anyone still call them grocery stores?) - it goes like this:

A father is shopping with his 9-year-old daughter, and she is chattering away, narrating the world, picking items up, asking questions, putting them back.  His responses, when they come at all, come in terse phrases, hardly even sentences.  He looks blankly at his smart phone, as if seeking rescue from her.

As the father of a 20-year-old daughter, I know he's missing out.  His girl is prompting him to teach her, to shape her mind, to be her father.  He's not up to it, at least not now.

A child can be exhausting, and I suspect that this one asks a lot.  But her asking is an opportunity to share the best part of life, and he's blowing it.  There were times I blew it, too, and I wish he wouldn't blow it right in front of me, reminding me of the chances I missed.

A mother at the bread rack, my next destination, remonstrates her son.  About what, I don't know.  I skip the bread for the moment and head for dairy.

Another mom calls softly for her son.  "Is that him?" asks a man in the aisle.  "No, he's thirteen."  But that impulse to help a stranger is a good thing, not so often observed in the wild.

A Hindu mother leads her teenage son, who amiably pushes their cart.  She's traditional enough to have a small claret spot on her forehead.  He moves like an American teen.  I would guess that he will never return to live in India.  American youth culture, for all its flaws - because of many of its flaws, is the most powerful melting pot we have.

The man raising money, out in the bitter cold, for his church's hunger and poverty programs recognizes me and blesses me.  I had spurned his appeal when I went back to the car to get my reusable bags.  Then I had reconsidered and given him a couple of dollars - if I could act on my care for the environment, I had to act on my care for the poor, never mind that his church will proselytize for a religion I don't share.

He said, "God bless you," and I do feel blessed.

Personal responsibility

For conservatives, personal responsibility means they're not responsible for anything:

Though such extraordinary self-pity may seem from the outside depressing to live with, it has its advantages. It gives the sufferer's life purpose and meaning. Since he's always the victim, he never has to step up and accept responsibility for anything. In short, being a conservative means never having to say you're sorry, which makes it ideal for people who are fundamentally incapable of admitting they ever have anything or anyone besides themselves to be sorry for.

Even Katrina, not their fault!!!  (Petulantly...)

Oh, I know the wingers think personal responsibility is not blaming anything larger than the person connected to the trigger finger, and that's a good definition for the rest of us.  But fundamentally they won't ever accept blame for anything.

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Wicked busy

Normal posting should resume soon. I've been wicked busy - as we say in the blessedly true blue state of Massachusetts - and I'm still tired and scattered from the Democratic Party GOTV effort over the past four days. (Yes, the coordinated campaign wanted Friday too, which would have been a fifth day. I just couldn't give it to them.)

I did work 35 hours over two days, and I blasted through election day on one hour of sleep, which is undignified for someone my age. I only bonked once, in the early afternoon when I needed to improvise past the breakdown of computerized turf generation, and my sleep-deprived brain balked. But we cut down the door lists manually and, by mid-afternoon, had most of our lists back out in the hands of volunteers to call and canvass voters who hadn't cast their ballots yet.

It was worth it. We won here with Rep. Jim McGovern and Gov. Deval Patrick against the standard Republican extremist Marty Lamb (buh-bye) and a stealthier, more corporate (and admittedly sane) Charlie Baker, while Democrats all across the middle of the country got whacked. Nearly all the local Democratic legislators won re-election too.

So I can exhale with satisfaction, not just relief, that this election is finally in the books.

Collecting lawn signs from around town tonight required no thinking, just a little animal navigation, and that was an enjoyable relief.

Right-wing dilemma

With abortion illegal and punished in many Mexican states, if a Mexican woman crosses the border to the United States while embarazada to have an abortion, is her fetus in the eyes of the wingnuts just another undeserving mojado and a danger to our national security, or is it a citizen deserving the full rights of a person?

Update: My 3,000th published post! Think I'll have a Tanqueray and tonic to celebrate.

Invented the Internet

On behalf of the big media, Dana Milbank reports the complete and total bullshit coming from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R-pearls of a swine) - with a dollop from Sen. John McCain (R-not a maverick). (Of course, he doesn't credit the liberal blogosphere, which has been on this story for a while.)

But tomorrow or the next day, she'll be on TV again, and no one will impugn her credibility despite her repeated willingness to justify her policy on the basis of lies.

This media laxity, not ever extended to a Democrat, is why Democrats must every day call out Republicans for their lies. The media won't help. They're too busy protecting their sources and proving they're not liberal. Democrats have to stop being polite in the face of unregenerate, unremorseful liars.

"You're well known, Gov. Brewer, to state the most breath-taking falsehoods as the basis for your immigration policy. Why should anyone believe a single word you ever say?"

The only alternative is to accept that American politics will continue to be driven by unrebutted lies.

No. 1 again

This week I'm tied for first in influence among Massachusetts political blogs. Ah right.

Look, any ranking that puts me ahead of Blue Mass Group has, uh, an idiosyncratic algorithm for determining influence.

But, hey, doesn't this again make me an award-winning blogger?

Tattoo U.

Not much political content, but I couldn't resist the pun in my title.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

Obligatory political jibe (because that's what I'm here for): If Sarah Palin had a small, tasteful tatt (as if!) on her hand to hide her crib notes, how many of her conservative followers would suddenly decide that body art is fine with them?

Joke's on me

Click image for full Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau.

Light posting for the next week

Having finally reached the pinnacle of writing the number 1 political blog in Massachusetts, I'm going on vacation. It's great to have recognition, but I have to wonder whether my rank this week came straight out of a random number generator.

Maybe I'll drop by here while on vacation. I do have a couple of ideas simmering, and I'm taking the laptop. But maybe I won't. So don't be surprised if your vast and prolific (hint, hint) comments don't get moderated right away.

Mom in the patriarchy

With Dad off hiking the Appalachian Trail, someone has to keep order.

Click image for full David Cohen cartoon.

For the wheel's still in spin

I may have spoken too soon.

The New York Times almost certainly went to print with Republican oppo. There'd be no fatal sin in that - if disclosed - but the long habit of Richard Blumenthal's self-description, including the very speech in 2008 the Times is on about, may have been honest. Which would make Linda McMahon the liar, even if it doesn't exculpate Blumenthal completely.

Time will, uh, may tell.

Update (6/1): Added to paragraph 2:

• the parenthetical in sentence 2 with the link to DailyKos
• the dependent clause at the end of sentence 3
  

New look

After nearly three years, I was ready for a new look. There may be further changes to come.

What do you think?

Typical wingnut shit-fit

If it's not obvious to you, Republicans are nasty sore losers. They don't believe in democracy. They believe only they can govern.

Democrats, by contrast, are much more even-tempered and stable.

Turd blossoming

New year, no change.

Despite Karl Rove's utter and total lack of any credibility whatsoever on any topics other than rank hypocrisy and political hardball, America's media continue to spread his propaganda. It's no surprise that the Wall Street Journal editorial page would print him. It should no longer be a surprise that CNN is happy to go along for the ride.

This is at least the third iteration of CNN's item thrusting forward Rove's concern-trolling of New Year's resolutions for President Barack Obama. The original had lots of negative comments, including one from me, pointing out Rove's arrant bullshit. CNN floated it back to the top of their political ticker by reposting it yesterday. This morning, they floated it up again, like a turd blossoming up from a failed flush, sans the hygienic responses of their readers.

Even though this happens often, wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - continue to flay CNN with all sorts of epithets. "Clinton News Network." "Communist News Network." Doing this shows them to be - not just dissenting or even wrong - but willfully stupid to the point of insanity.

The article of faith for conservatives that the media is filled with liberal conspirators who are aligned against them is just that, an article of faith. Like many of the other things they believe, it is not based on reality.

It's still true that liberals are the reality-based community. 2010 will be another year I'll be here pointing out the constant bullshit of conservatives. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, and most of the Washington Democrats don't seem to have the stomach for it.