Political Tevye

If I were a wingnut (ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum), I would ... be incensed that this Democrat could check into the Betty Ford Clinic without being identified as a Democrat. Whoops, he's a Republican.

If I were a wingnut (ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum), I would ... continue to deny that right-wing violence is a reality in America.

Update (6/2): For those who are in denial of ideological roots of the killing of George Tiller...

Shopping for an AR-15

Boston cops want to pack the semiautomatic version of the M-16 into battle on the streets of Boston. Uh, no. What a stupid idea.

The dangers are not imaginary, but the police have to go to Mumbai to justify their desire for new toys. In Columbine, the police hesitated to establish a perimeter, or so they said.

The BPD wants a weapon with a range of a five hundred meters to shoot bad guys in the city. How many 500-meter fields of fire are there in Boston? How many should anyone send a high-velocity bullet tumbling down? How many would be empty enough to have a righteous shooting?

If I were one of the targeted bad guys, I might think about jacking a cop car to get the assault rifle out of the trunk.

Better body armor would be much safer for cops and civilians.

Program note: Leaving on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again...

Even if I can't find a moment here or there to blog, I'll be back Monday or Tuesday.

All aboard

Hard to steer the bandwagon without jumping on...

Molinaro also said that by taking a seat at the table, Dow was able to get some satisfaction: The proposed new rules, while costly to the chemical industry as a whole, will also help companies create less waste and be more energy-efficient, he said, saving them money in the long run.

Gaming the system

This is hilarious:

Quite suddenly, being confronted with an unapologetically intellectual, hyper-articulate black dude who is self-assured to the brink of arrogance is no longer sure to create the kind of bewilderment and consternation that guaranteed me major laughs after college admissions and job interviews or "meet the parents" activities. In the salad days of being the only African-American male in Advanced Placement U.S. History, I could generate a palpable sense of awkwardness by stopping the lesson to quiz my instructor on the specifics of Cointelpro; my scholarly younger brother may never get to experience that perverse thrill. Where I got my kicks imagining that my flamboyant displays of subversive cerebral fortitude made the white establishment want my head on a stick, my brother's comparable acts will be met with a propensity to picture his on the dollar bill.

Best of all, no one imagines race-baiters like Rush Limbaugh on anything related to currency any more.

Change!

... and not enough change.

Tom Yesterday is right on.

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Identity politics

Since I'm outsourcing today to Atrios's outsources, here's something from TAPPED:

What people like Taylor find so offensive about Sotomayor's statement is that it properly exposes the perspective of white, Christian heterosexual men as specific to their experience, rather than the omniscient eye of G-d they're used to presenting it as. Does anyone seriously believe Dred Scott or Plessy v. Fergueson would have been upheld by any court that had the remotest idea of what it was like to be black or a slave? Or similarly that the court would have held in Minor v. Happersett that being a citizen didn't mean you had a right to vote if you were a woman? Do we really believe that judges in these cases were "simply upholding the law" in the absence of the cultural and social prejudices of their times?

Ends justify the means

... for the unprincipled Republicans.

Here's what's clear: The Republicans in the Senate believe they need only 51 votes to pass their program, while the Democrats need 60.

Not only is it time to confirm Sonia Sotomayor, it's time to seat Al Franken. Enough bowing to threats from the likes of John Cornyn.

(h/t Atrios)

Tea leaves

There's a certain kind of journalism that calls itself analysis. Sometimes it's useful for setting the background and the imperatives the actors are acting from.

Then there's this kind of piece from Peter Canellos. It strings together a few slightly inside-politics tidbits with a few quotes such as this:

"If [Sotomayor's confirmation] takes a month, it does bump things up against the adjournment time," said Dartmouth College political scientist Linda Fowler. "The worry for Obama is less the loss of bipartisan spirit than the time constraints. An acrimonious nomination fight just eats up a lot of time."

There was an opportunity here put in perspective the previous two Supreme Court confirmations:

• Samuel Alito - "Samuel Alito is gliding toward confirmation as a Supreme Court justice after a week of hearings..."
• John Roberts - "The White House swearing-in ceremony took place three hours after the Senate voted 78 to 22 to confirm Roberts."

There are two possible explanations:

• Republicans are much nastier and more focused in these fights.
• Many journalists are eager or at least willing to adopt the Republican narrative.
  

Just for a moment, I'm going to hold in abeyance my natural suspicion of both Republicans and pundits.

I bet there were analyses just like Canellos's before Alito and Roberts, and those fights hardly amounted to anything. Now, there are sixty Democrats (or should be), and the Sotomayor confirmation will most likely take place with keening, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, but it will still happen quickly.

And the analyses will continue unabated and unabashed.

Resting now from struggle

Far be it from me to speak ill of the war dead on their day of special remembrance or any other day, but it is still right for us to recall that what they did was not to act as superheroes but rather, as ordinary people, to rouse themselves to give something extraordinary. To my mind, that makes them all the more honorable.

Click image for attribution under CCA ShareAlike 1.0.

No excuse

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

A good grilling

Can you make him stop talking?

Click image for full Jeff Darcy/Plain Dealer cartoon.

Obituary logic

I read obits, not all the time but often enough. Inside their formula, I often find nuggets of lives well lived - or of lives of suffering and woundedness, some of those wounds self-inflicted.

I've read enough to know that sometimes "heart failure" euphemizes suicide. I've read enough - and lived enough - to know that many a fierce battle with cancer ended with a final acquiescence and peace and farewell and sometimes acceleration that for some reason we seldom talk about.

When I started this reading habit maybe twenty years ago, I told myself that I was looking for the poignant or evocative final character sketch, a biography that I might imagine into a novel. I also told myself that I was trying to get a handle on mortality data, on what kills and when in a life death comes.

Those motives were real and not just rationalizations, but I soon noticed that I actually took comfort from the obits - they seldom marked the death of someone like me. I started to look in each obit for the reason that I could distance myself from the dead, the reason that I could rationalize why I still lived and the dead person did not.

Mostly, I was young, and the dead were old.

Most of the men my age who died were outrageously drunk and not wearing their seat belts. But I also read about so many women in their late forties dying of breast cancer that, despite my relative safety, I started to take their deaths personally on behalf of women in my life. AIDS also took many of my age cohort, and the obits of mostly gay men made their tragedy very real for me.

Nowadays, many more of my peers turn up dead of heart attacks, and that is damn sobering, which might explain my continuing elation at recently getting this year's much better cholesterol numbers - the measure of a middle-aged man.

This has all been preamble to an attempt to understand the sheer hatred and lack of human sympathy seen so often on newspaper comment threads and particularly today on the Washington Post's rare story on poor people as human beings, as distinct from the usual story on poor people as social burden and problem.

I understand seeking safety in differences from the victim. Rationalizing away the vulnerabilities we all have and feel is a human universal. Poverty, like dying, is for other people or so we hope, and if we can show the reasons, all the better.

Just as distance from dying helps, distance from poverty helps. I cherish my distance from those thin years when canned beans from my grandfather's burned down factory helped my parents make ends meet. But I don't try to blot that time out of memory.

I have a hard time understanding how strongly people want to blame both the sick and the poor. There's no doubt that many poor people make poor decisions, even from among their dearth of choices. There's a reflex among conservatives that these poor decisions are the whole picture and absolve us of any social responsibility to help. Never mind that lots of affluent people, including me, make lousy economic decisions - we can afford them to a degree that the poor cannot.

Political correctness run amok

Liberty [sic] University [sic] revokes the charter of their chapter of the College Democrats:

Maria Childress, the staff adviser to the club, told the paper the school — which opposes abortion rights and gay marriage — had issues with the Democratic Party platform.

Childress says she was told by Mark Hine, the vice president of student affairs, that "'You can't be a Democrat and be a Christian and be a university representative.'"

Never mind that admitting to being a Democrat at LU is like being a black Mormon or a gay Republican, this is the most intrusive kind of political correctness. It will be fun to hear all the usual decriers of PC condemn LU for this. As if.

The silence I expect from, say, David Horowitz, would prove once and for all that the problem the right has with political correctness is not the concept but whose political correctness gets enforced. If the academy would only enforce their political correctness, they'd be thrilled.

But back to LU: Democrats everywhere should take this charter revocation as a point of pride.

Perfect word for it

Evangelical Christians engaged in soul-searching over torture... Finding their souls? Not so much.

Instead, they're happy to cede their morality to the state:

Rev. Ronald Kuykendall, an evangelical pastor in Gainesville, Florida, says that the question is difficult to answer because everyone has a different of definition of torture. He says he would support the torture of a terrorist if "the techniques used are lawful, necessary" and the ultimate purpose is to save lives.

Torture? I don't even know what the word means, says Kuykendall. He's lying when he says that, of course. He has bought into the comforting evasion of moral responsibility of the Bushist torture policy.

Don't try it, you'll like it

Krugman nails the insurance fraud being done through deceptive attack ads:

“We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system,” says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that’s true, why don’t you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it’s really that bad?

The market relies on competition, and corporatists in both parties (all the Republicans and a large number of Democrats) pay lip service to it, but American big business intentionally structures itself to avoid competition.

The motivation of business is obvious: Competition is often fatal to the losing enterprise.

To avoid it, businesses scale up by mergers and acquisitions until they're too big to fail - or so they hope. Look around and you'll see that national markets are usually dominated by a few large companies, not at all the environment that Adam Smith envisioned.

Businesses also strive to define a niche in which they can dominate for the same reason.

Like predators in the state of nature, businesses are not at all interested in starting any fight they might lose, even if the odds of losing are quite low. Wolves are happy eating rodents.

Fighting the consequences of elections

Republicans oppose democracy:

NRSC Chairman John Cornyn has said Coleman's challenge could go through federal courts and take "years" to resolve. He also threatened "World War III" if Democrats try to seat Franken prematurely.

Yet there's no hue and cry from the big media, who continue to think bipartisanship is even possible with these anti-election extremists.

Go nuclear on Cornyn. He's asking for it. Do it in such a way as to preserve the traditional prerogatives of the minority - so long as they don't abuse it.

But let Cornyn not make the mistake of believing there's any comity left in the Senate.

Dirty baker's dozen

Salon summarizes the case for some domestic high-value detainees. No, not a case for torturing them, only the case for detaining them.

Great and powerful Darth

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

P.T. Barnum wrong!?

Could it be that some of the so-called leadership of the Republican Party has finally achieved something P.T. Barnum said had never happened? Have they gone broke (electorally) by underestimating the intelligence of the American public? Middle school level politics didn't work, so they're devolving to second grade! Michael Steele's against the GOP resolution, so you know it'll probably pass.

Really, will they try "Democrat Retard Party" next? "Democrat Pansy Party"? "Democrat Mother Wears Army Boots Party"? "Democrat Mother Swims Out to Meet Troop Ships Party"?

Their behavior says that they believe their base is composed of lunatic, unreasoned, infantile, simplistic morons. Or maybe they're just lunatic, unreasoned, infantile, simplistic morons.