Month: May 2010

Dr Fringe

by digby

So our favorite libertarian crank went on TV this morning and made even more of an ass of himself. But as it turns out, not only is Paul associated with militia movement and neo-confederates, he’s associated with yet another far right fringe group as well. (In fact, is there any far right group he isn’t associated with?) Here’s Bruce Wilson:

In Rand Paul we have a mild-mannered non-Civil Rights Act supporting eye surgeon who in April 2009 attended a rally held by a political party [the Constitution Party] that’s been heavily influenced by a movement whose founder, Rousas Rushdoony, advocated executing homosexuals by stoning, wanted to reimpose the institution of slavery, and maintained that the Earth rotated around the Sun.

Wilson reports that Paul, like his father, likes to appear at Constitution party events. Here is a rally in Minnesota from a year ago which preceded another event at which Paul was the featured speaker:

He makes Amity Schlaes sound like John Maynard Keynes. Later that night he was featured speaker at the Constitution Party of Minnesota’s ‘event of the year.”

The odd thing about Rand and Ron Paul’s political tendency is that it offers liberals and progressives a number of points of agreement, probably more than with more ‘mainstream’ conservative GOP politicians. For example, Ron Paul has been a principled opponent of the invasion of Iraq and US military adventurism in the Mideast generally, and Rand Paul espouses the same position.

He has an interesting dodge on that, I’ve noticed. He says we need a “formal declaration of war” which he offers up as some sort of protection against wars like Iraq, which is just silly. They congress voted on Iraq just as if it were a declaration of war and if it had been “formal” the outcome wouldn’t have changed a thing. He is running for the Senate as a Republican, which makes it difficult to be an isolationist, so perhaps he’s just being cute for political purposes.

More intriguing is his critique of the Fed, which he explicitly says should be ended not mended and leads a chant at the end to that effect. What’s interesting is his reasoning for that, which is radical, and his prescription, which is utter nonsense. He didn’t go into the “gold standard” rap, but the signs behind him say it all.

And then there’s Ron and Rand’s close association with The Constitution party, which is founded on Christian Reconstructionist principles:

But it’s hard to get much more extreme than Christian Reconstructionism, whose founder Rushdoony was a Holocaust denier, a racist, a creationist, and an advocate for slavery who claimed that African-American slaves were lucky.

Weigh it for yourself — Howard Phillips, who founded the Constitution Party, has, according to journalist Frederick Clarkson, described Rousas J. Rushdoony as “my wise counseler.”

As Rushdoony wrote in Politics of Guilt and Pity:

The white man is being systematically indoctrinated into believing that he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro. Granted that some Negroes were mistreated as slaves, the fact still remains that nowhere in all history or in the world today has the Negro been better off. The life expectancy of the Negro increased when he was transported to America. He was not taken from freedom into slavery, but from a vicious slavery to degenerate chiefs to a generally benevolent slavery in the United States. There is not the slightest evidence that any American Negro had ever lived in a “free society” in Africa; even the idea did not exist in Africa. The move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro…

None of this, of course, is Rand Paul’s direct responsibility. But it certainly is suggestive.

Yes, there are suggestions all over the place that, like his father, Rand has issues with race — and that he’s a full-blown, far right, fringe nutcase. Which makes him the perfect manifestation of the Tea Party. In fact, I don’t think they could have found a more perfect candidate.

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“Inside Job “

by digby

I can’t wait to see this movie:

If you don’t quite get what happened to the global economy over the last two years, or who’s at fault, you’re not alone. Indeed, that’s nearly everyone’s situation. The big crash of 2008 and 2009 and its ongoing ripple effects — such as the European fiscal crisis that’s rendering my visit to France a little cheaper every day — seemed to come from nowhere as if by natural causes, as unpredictable and unmanageable as the Icelandic volcano or a Gulf Coast hurricane. Charles Ferguson is here to tell the world that the crisis that wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth, threw millions of people out of their homes and out of work, and further widened the gulf between rich and poor was no accident. It was a crime. Ferguson, a former software entrepreneur and policy-wonk scholar turned filmmaker, is definitely no left-wing bomb-thrower or closet Marxist. But he plays one in the movies, you might say. His new documentary, “Inside Job” — arguably the smash hit of Cannes so far — offers a lucid and devastating history of how the crash happened, who caused it and how they got away with it.[…]There was nothing reasonable or decent or redeemable about the world of high finance, in Ferguson’s judgment, by the time the 21st-century bubble reached its peak around 2006. As he illustrates with a damning parade of interviews, images and public testimony, the financial industry had ridden 20-plus years of manic free-market deregulation and neoliberal fiscal policy from one crisis to the next, surfing a rising tide of greed and corruption. (There are several people in this movie, prominent among them former George W. Bush advisor Glenn Hubbard and Harvard economics chairman John Y. Campbell, who will rue the day they agreed to talk to Ferguson.)

In a captivating conversation with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (who looks here like a knight in shining armor, believe it or not) Ferguson suggests that the financial industry has become a criminal class insulated from society, where profit justifies everything and morality and ethics, not to mention basic human decency, are totally irrelevant. Gaining remarkable access to a wide range of financial insiders, experts and academics, he builds a persuasive case that by conquering Washington with piles of campaign money and conquering the economics discipline with free-market ideology (and more piles of money), the financial industry built a fortress of deregulation that allowed it to plunder the peasantry with no control or oversight

It sounds as though this is a truthful and lucid rendition of what happened, which is sorely needed. I hope it get wide distribution and a lot of people are able to see it. Since the Democrats are too complicit to build this narrative for political purposes — and the Republicans are beyond any hope at all — it’s left to others to do it on behalf of the people. This sounds like a worthy effort in that cause.

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Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

by digby

J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends counted the number of rumors about President G.W. Bush and President Obama that were identified and determined by rumor-validation site, snopes.com, to be true, false, a mixture of true and false, or uncertain.

Granted, snopes debunkings are self-selected, but there is no reason to believe they didn’t bother to look into Bush rumors.

Jay Livingston summarizes:

In less than two years, Obama rumor-mongers have had nearly twice the output that their Bush counterparts managed in eight years – 87 to 47. And while the Bush rumors split almost evenly true-false, false Obama rumors dwarfed the true ones. The false rumors about Obama outnumbered the total number of rumors about Bush. And while the lies about Obama are almost all negative, some of the false rumors about Bush are quite flattering, along the lines of the George Washington cheery tree rumor – like the rumor that had Bush paying for the funeral of a boy who had drowned near the Crawford ranch.

Looking closer at the mixed rumors, Bell reports that:

I delved down to the stories that the site designates as a mixture of truth and falsehood. For Obama, in most cases the truth is innocuous while the lie reflects poorly on the President, particularly photographs that are misrepresented or show behavior that produced no complaints when his predecessors did the same. In contrast, in this mixture of truth and falsehood about George W. Bush praying with an injured soldier, the lie reflected well on that President…

Looking at the last two Presidential candidate losers reveals the same pattern: more false rumors about Kerry than McCain.

I can’t even imagine what it would be for Clinton. It was a full blown industry.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to why there are so many more rumors about Democrats than Republicans?

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Trembling Economy

by digby

Don’t look now, but something is happening to the economy. The DOW is on track for the biggest monthly fall since February of 2009. It was off 3.6% today, down 376 points. The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 were even worse.

I don’t know what it means. Lots of theories abound. Maybe it’s the unexpectedly bad jobs numbers. financial reform bill. Maybe it’s Europe. But whatever it is, with the jobs data today and news of rising foreclosures, it’s possible that we are looking at a double dip recession. And that is very bad news in an environment in which the entire political establishment is fouling its trousers over deficits. Not that there’s ever a good time to go back into recession but there really couldn’t be a worse time than now. The administration has (stupidly) allowed itself to be backed into a corner in which it can’t spend now that it’s thrown in with Peter Peterson and the deficit scolds.

It’s funny how rarely the Tinkerbell Strategy works, whether in foreign policy or economics.

Update: read this.

Men With Guns

by digby

Libertarians are always screaming about government power being enforced by Men With Guns (thus requiring that we arm ourselves to the teeth to fight them.) In light of today’s trip down memory lane to the good old days of American Apartheid and the question of whether it was correct to use the Power Of The State to end centuries of racial discrimination, I find that it’s actually a good illustration of the essential bullshit at the heart of the philosophy.

Before the Greensboro Woolworth sit-in, others had challenged the law in similar fashion. For instance, in Durham North Carolina a famous sit-in took place at an ice cream parlor:

The original sit-in in 1957 was organized by Reverend Douglas Moore, pastor of the Asbury Temple Methodist Church in Durham, seven protesters in total assembled at the church before going to the ice cream shop.

Like many restaurants of the era, the Royal Ice Cream Company had separate entrances and eating areas for white and black patrons. The doorway on the Dowd Street side in Durham had a “White Only” sign and, on Roxboro Street, a sign was marked “Colored Only” says the state archives.

So what happened? Men With Guns, that’s what happened:

The manager of the ice cream store refused to serve the young sit-in participants and they were arrested on trespassing charges by police.

Court documents show that on June 24th, all of the participants were found guilty by a judge on trespassing charges and were fined $10 each plus court costs. They appealed to Superior Court, but lost there as well when an all-white jury rendered a guilty verdict.

The case was appealed all the way to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions and thereby continued to allow segregated public facilities.

The state historical marker site says that the case was later appealed to the US Supreme Court. The high court refused to hear the case, and on July 15, 1958, the seven protesters paid fines totaling $433.25.

This is where you see what really matters to right wing libertarians and pseudo-libertarians like Papa and Baby Paul. Property rights. That’s what Men With Guns are for — and that’s all they’re for. It’s just fine to call in the jackbooted thugs when they are protecting something you own. When you try to define freedom in more abstract terms than preserving wealth and property, they don’t have any answers except that it doesn’t make “good business sense” to inhibit others’ freedom.

And guess who that benefits? (Hint:the people who own everything.)

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Suffer The Little Children

by digby

For those following today’s Texas school board shennaigans, in which a bunch of cretins and yahoos are deciding what American history is (and also the English language) here’s the backstory that led up to this:

The Board of Education consists of 15 elected officeholders. The split is 10-5 in favor of Republicans. Of those 10, seven are highly conservative.

“This is a board controlled by extremists who have determined to turn Social Studies classrooms into a tool to promote their ideology,” said Dan Quinn, spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network. “They’ve been successful in turning what should be a curriculum document into a political manifesto.”

(TFN is a nonpartisan group which “advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the religious right,” according to its Web site.)

Progressives are finally starting to get serious about challenging these school board takeovers and are running two candidates for the school board this fall and you can help:

In March, the State Board of Education provoked outrage when it removed Thomas Jefferson from a history lesson on Enlightenment thinkers while adopting a new social-studies curriculum on a straight partisan vote. That was just one of many changes pushed by ideologues on the board. This May the board it continuing their assault on history.

Parents and educators alike are appalled that the board often overrides recommendations by historians and scientists in favor of their own half-baked ideas.

Electing Dr. Judy Jennings and Dr. Rebecca Bell-Metereau to the SBOE in November is the only way to put an end to extremists using the board to promote an ideological agenda.

You can also follow the events at today’s board meeting on twitter at #sboe.

Who’s His Daddy?

by digby

My, my, it seems as if everyone’s writing about Rand Paul this morning. I wasn’t going to bother because those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’ve been writing about him for months — eve since he emerged as a front runner for the Kentucky nomination. And, as everyone knows, his father’s very special brand of Bircher libertarianism libertarianism has informed the tea parties from the beginning.All this is old news to us, right?

Last night on Rachel Maddow’s show Paul tried to walk the fine line between the inherently racist effect of libertarian policies and being a racist. And he didn’t do a very good job of it. (His father is a much, much smarter politician.) But part of his problem is that it’s very difficult to know if Paul is just a childishly naive Randian or if he actually has more racist motives, in the Bircher tradition. He protests a lot that he doesn’t. But it’s complicated by the history of his father, who most definitely has held some very noxious racist views:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

To understand Paul’s philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a “distinguished counselor.” The institute has also published his books.

The politics of the organization are complicated–its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who viewed the state as nothing more than “a criminal gang”–but one aspect of the institute’s worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute’s senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods’s book, saying that it “heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the “War for Southern Independence” and attacks “Lincoln cultists”; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell wrote to supporters, “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it.” Paul’s newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that “the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society” and that “there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it.”

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute–including Paul–may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history–the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, “There are too many libertarians in this country … who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, … find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.”

Paul’s alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began,” read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounced “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were “the only people to act like real Americans,” it explained, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.”

Rand Paul was 29 years old in 1992. Granted, there’s no reason to assume that he holds views like that. But to he best of my knowledge, he hasn’t repudiated them either.

There’s also the little problem of Rand Paul’s spokesman’s crude racism, which led to his resignation. Is Paul to be held liable for the words of others? No. But a pattern does start to emerge that raises the question as to whether Paul is just a starry-eyed libertopian who thinks that government is the only institution that oppresses and that racism will disappear naturally once people realize that bigotry interferes with profits — or if he’s a chip off the old block.

Not that it matters in practical terms. Obviously, libertarians in general are not necessarily racists. But their ideology inexorably leads to a society in which racism is normal and tolerated and where those who have the social power and economic clout are able to rig the game in their favor. You know — the America of 40 years ago before the Civil Rights Act. It’s not like we never gave Rand’s libertarianism a chance to work.

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“This was the day everybody was worried about”

by digby

It’s come ashore:

A chocolate-brown blanket of oil about as thick as latex paint has invaded reedy freshwater wetlands at Louisiana’s southeastern tip, prompting Gov. Bobby Jindal to step up calls Wednesday for building emergency sand barriers.

Jindal and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser led a flotilla of media to inspect the oil encroaching on remote wetlands lining Pass a Loutre, near where the mouth of the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig disaster had been lapping at the coast before. But this was not the light rainbow sheen or the scattered tar balls seen in previous days.

Jindal, sitting at the edge of an airboat, swept a handheld fishing net through the mess and held it up. It was coated with brown sludge, which had stained the lower shafts of the leafy green reeds sticking up to eight feet out of the water.

“This has laid down a blanket in the marsh that will destroy every living thing there,” Nungesser said.

Food: The Next Step

by tristero

I made butter from scratch over the weekend. Man, was it hard! Here’s what I had to do:

1. Leave a pint of heavy cream out overnight.
2. Pour slightly soured cream into a mixer and whisk it for about 10 minutes.
3. Butter.

Tastes great and it’s cheap.* But it’s not the cost that got me thinking. It was the trivial nature of the task.** That got me marveling about how damn silly and inefficient our food manufacturing is today. Granted, butter-making is not the best example of inefficiency, but, but… why not more locally made butter? Isn’t that all of the same piece with the crazy economies of scale that make it cheaper to import (crummy) garlic from China than grow the stuff 75 miles away and truck it to Manhattan?

Since I am the first to admit I don’t know a thing about most of this, I left it there. But, amazingly, it turns out people that do know a lot about food are thinking much along the same lines:

[Farmers markets] have had a revolutionary effect on the way food is grown and marketed in the United States. Still, at a most generous estimate, less than 2% of fruits and vegetables are actually sold at them. So how can they move beyond that?…

What about turning what are now floating street markets into permanent structures? The space that isn’t used by farmers on non-market days can be used for other local small businesses as well, turning the farmers market into a permanent hub for the whole community.

That leads to blends of farmers markets and more commercial enterprises, such as the Ferry Building in San Francisco and the Oxbow Market in Napa. These are essentially high-end food markets selling everything from coffee to culinary antiques, but they also offer space for farmers to bring in their produce on a daily or weekly basis.

Like I said, none of these ideas is perfect yet, but can’t you see a glimmer of possibility?

At the Hollywood farmers market, they’ve used grant money to build a commercial kitchen. Not only does it produce lunches based on farmers market produce, but it also serves as a development kitchen for farmers who are looking for secondary uses for produce — say someone wants to play with turning potatoes into chips, or fruit into jam [or cream into butter!]. They also use it to teach classes that introduce the underprivileged to the benefits of farmers market produce and how to use it.

Cue the inevitable comment: “it’s all well and good to ‘introduce the underprivileged to the benefits of farmers market produce’ but local produce is too expensive even for most of the middle-class to eat on a regular basis.”

Yes, that’s more or less true right now. The problem is that the current food manufacturing and delivery system in the United States simply can’t last much longer – meaning a few decades, certainly not much more than fifty years. Soon, the price of fuel is gonna make that (crummy) Chinese garlic incredibly expensive. Our present diet is creating profound public health crises – that’s plural; it’s not just diabetes, y’know. And that’s for starters.

These tiny, elitist-sounding ideas may not (or if you prefer, probably won’t) scale up to become central to a new food delivery system. But they’re part of a serious effort to change something that is seriously broken and, to coin a phrase, not sustainable. Big Food may find Parsons’ ideas laughable, and for all I know, they’re right. But something has to change radically.

And soon.

*Prices from an online retailer (no reason to plug them; email me if you must know), roughly equivalent to the prices I paid here in Manhattan:

Organic heavy cream 1 pint: $3.49
Organic butter 1 pound: $5.99

1 pint cream ~ 14 oz butter

Homemade organic butter: $.25/oz
Industrial organic: $.37/oz

It’s much cheaper if you buy conventional cream. I used organic because I read somewhere that the processing of conventional can interfere with the creation of butter. BTW, if you don’t have a mixer, go here.

**No, I’m not suggesting that everyone make butter. Creating food from scratch is becoming a serious hobby of mine; that’s the only reason I did it. That said… I gotta say it’s hard for me to come up with reasons not to make your own butter – unless you’re some kind of obsessed foodie who affects a preference for the flavor of butter from a particular herd of cows or something… Hmm…I wonder…can you actually taste the difference? Must find out, must find out…

Killing The Mentally Ill

by digby

I’m afraid that any American with a heart condition, epilepsy or mental illness of any kind is going to have to start wearing a big sign saying “please don’t tase me, it will probably kill me,” so that police won’t use their “alternative” to deadly force on you. (If you don’t have health care or don’t know if you have a heart condition, well, just drop to the ground and submit yourself to police every time you see one, just in case.)

These things are killing a lot of people. If tasers were a drug or a food additive they would have been taken off the market a long time ago with this track record.

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