Ayn Rand or MLK: pick one
by David Atkins
MLK:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?'”
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Conservatives get to claim one or the other. They can’t have both.
And if they pick door #2, they can’t have this guy, either.
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La estrategia del sur
by digby
This takes some chutzpah. Or should I say “huevos”:
On a day set aside to honor civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Mitt Romney plans to tout his extreme immigration positions during a campaign stop in South Carolina today — with Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s and Alabama’s immigration laws, at his side. He will attack his competitors Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their softer immigration stances, which could resonate with South Carolina voters who support that state’s harmful immigration law.
“Mitt Romney stands apart from the others. He’s the only one who’s taken a strong across-the-board position on immigration,” Kobach said, and he told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that Romney was much farther to the right on illegal immigration than his fellow presidential candidates.
That’s nice. It looks like we’ve got a new form of the Southern Strategy in place. Recall Lee Atwater’s famous quote:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”
Looks like they’ve found a way to avoid that abstraction — screaming “illegal, illegal.”
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A 24-year-old Columbia man has received $50,000 to settle a lawsuit against the city police department and two officers over their stun gun use.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reported that Cadilac Derrick settled his federal civil suit earlier this month. The case was then dismissed from Missouri’s Western District U.S. Court after it went to mediation.
Maybe if a few more towns and cities had to pay out money for this authoritarian brutality, police departments might find it in their best interest to curb this behavior. There’s no excuse for it, but until someone, somewhere, is held responsible any one of us could be electrocuted in the front seat of our car for failing to properly respond to a police officer in less than half a minute.
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Government as political machine
by digby
Didn’t we just go through something like this with the Bush administration?
I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum.
I don’t think people ever properly understood what was going on with the Bush administration’s manipulation of the government itself for partisan gain. For example, they turned normal non-partisan jobs into political appointments, purged departments of those who they deemed to be suspiciously liberal and unleashed the Department of Justice to intervene in elections on behalf of the GOP.That’s not even counting the systematic takeover of the judiciary.
This is a hallmark of conservative movement goals, which seeks to transform the government itself into a partisan apparatus. It most closely resembles machine politics, with a full blown patronage operations devoted to installing like-minded and financially dependent operatives into the permanent machinery of the government.
We knew this, of course, after watching the Bushies over eight long years.But the Democratic administration came in believing they had vanquished this unseemly form of partisan warfare by the sheer will of Will.I.Am so there was no need to look in the rearview mirror to try to right what was wrong. No lessons have been learned as a result — and presidential candidates feel perfectly free to campaign on the idea that they have a right to fire government employees who they don’t see as being ideologically congenial. Considering that they think science and facts have a liberal bias these days, I think we can see the writing on the wall.
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MLK and conservatives
When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.”
Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”
That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”
That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.
The idea was expounded most systematically in a 567-page book that came out shortly after King’s assassination, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, by one of the right’s better writers, Lionel Lokos, and from the conservative movement’s flagship publisher, Arlington House. “He left his country a legacy of lawlessness,” Lokos concluded. “The civil disobedience glorified by Martin Luther King [meant] that each man had the right to put a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on laws that met with his favor.” Lokos laid the rise of black power, with its preachments of violence, at King’s feet. This logic followed William F. Buckley, who, in a July 20, 1967 column titled “King-Sized Riot In Newark,” imagined the dialogue between a rioter and a magistrate:
“You do realize that there are laws against burning down delicatessen stores? Especially when the manager and his wife are still inside the store?”
“Laws Schmaws. Have you never heard of civil disobedience? Have you never heard of Martin Luther King?”King was a particular enemy of Chicago’s white ethnics for the marches for open housing he organized there in 1966. The next year, the Chicago archdiocese released a new catechism book. “One of the leaders of the Negro people is a brave man named Martin Luther King. … He preaches the message of Jesus, ‘Love one another.'” Chicago Catholic laymen, outraged, demanded an FBI investigation of the local clergy.
We know about the Chicagoans who hated King enough to throw bricks at him. We have forgotten that, while such hooliganism was universally reviled, the reviling establishment also embraced Reagan-like arguments about why that was only to be expected. Upon King’s assassination, The Chicago Tribune editorialized: “A day of mourning is in order”–but this was because civil disobedience had finally won the day. “Moral values are at the lowest level since the decadence of Rome,” the editors argued, but only one of their arguments was racial: “If you are black, so goes the contention, you are right, and you must be indulged in every wish. Why, sure, break the window and make off with the color TV set, the case of liquor, the beer, the dress, the coat, and the shoes. We won’t shoot you. That would be ‘police brutality.'” Another was: “At countless universities, the doors of dormitories are open to mixed company, with no supervision.”
The conservative argument, consistent and ubiquitous, was that King, claiming the mantle of moral transcendence, was actually the vector for moral relativism. They made it by reducing the greatest moral epic of the age to a churlish exercise in bean-counting. Shortly after the 1965 Selma voting-rights demonstrations, Klansmen shot dead one of the marchers, a Detroit housewife named Viola Liuzza, for the sin of riding in a car with a black man. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended her funeral. No fair! Buckley cried, noting that a white cop had been shot by a black man in Hattiesburg shortly thereafter; “Humphrey did not appear at his funeral or even offer condolences.” He complained, too, of the news coverage: “The television cameras showed police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of the demonstrators, but they did not show the defiance … of those who provoked them beyond the endurance that we tend to think of as human.” (In actual fact, sheriff’s officers charged into the crowd on horseback swinging rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire.)
By now you may be asking: What is the point of this unpleasant exercise? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on ideological sins? Well, not every conservative wrong has been righted. It’s true that conservatives today don’t sound much like Buckley in the ’60s, but they still haven’t figured King out: Andrew Busch of the Ashbrook Center for Public Policy, writing about King’s exegesis on just and unjust laws, said, “In these few sentences, King demolishes much of the philosophical foundation of contemporary liberalism” (liberals are moral relativists, you see, and King was appealing to transcendent moral authority); Busch (speaking for reams of similar banality you can find by searching National Review Online) also said that “he rallied his followers with an explicitly religious message” and thus “stands as a stinging rebuke to those today who argue that religion and politics should never mix”; and Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation wrote in National Review Online that “[a]n agenda that advocates quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from King’s vision” (not true, as historians have demonstrated). Still, why not honor their conversion on its own terms?
The answer is, if you don’t mind, a question of moral relativism versus transcendence. When it comes to Martin Luther King, conservatives are still mere bean-counters. We must honor King because there wasn’t a day in his life after 1955 when he didn’t risk being cut down in cold blood and still stood steadfast. Conservatives break down what should be irreducible in this lesson into discrete terms–King believed in points X, Y, and Z–but now they chalk up the final sum on the positive side of the ledger. But this misses the point: King alone among contemporary heroes is worthy of a national holy day not because he mixed faith and politics, nor because he enunciated a sentimental dream. It was because he represented something truly terrifying.
When King was shuttling back and forth to Memphis in support of striking garbage workers, Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington typified the conservative establishment’s understanding of him: He was “training 3,000 people to start riots.” What looks today obviously like transcendent justice looked to conservatives then like anarchy. The conservative response to King–to demonize him in the ’60s and to domesticate him today–has always been essentially the same: It has been about coping with the fear that seekers of justice may overturn what we see as the natural order and still be lionized. But if we manage to forget that, sometimes, doing things that terrify people is the only recourse to injustice, there is no point in having a Martin Luther King Day at all.
And many of these people are still terrified. And angry. Which is why we have things like this happening just last year:
Had his homemade bomb gone off—one he had diabolically constructed using shrapnel coated with a substance meant to keep blood from clotting in wounds—Kevin Harpham would have undoubtedly caused the death and injury of many people at last year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Unity March in Spokane, Washington
When bomb experts from the FBI Laboratory reconstructed the device and detonated it, the results were sobering, Cleary said. “The shrapnel exploded with such a high velocity that some targets in the shape of humans were blown over, and a metal filing cabinet was perforated—it was filled with holes.”
“Harpham intended to use this extremely lethal weapon on individuals solely because of their race and perhaps their religion,” Cleary said. “His plan was to wreak havoc on a crowd of innocents.”
Instead, Harpham was eventually caught and recently sentenced to 32 years in prison for a hate crime and other offenses related to the attempted bombing. The case illustrates how a quick response by citizens and local law enforcement averted a tragedy, and how teamwork and time-tested investigative techniques led to the apprehension of an individual who has shown no remorse for his actions.
“Clearly he intended to detonate the device, cause mass carnage, and then survey the devastation,” said Special Agent Frank Harrill, who supervised the investigation. “Harpham was acting out against what he termed multiculturalism, but his hatred was firmly rooted in violent white supremacy. This was a prototypical hate crime.”
According to the SPLC Harpham was heavily influenced by the film Loose Change, which seems to be a favorite of the Alex Jones crowd. It’s a production of the group We Are Change (unironically known as WAC) which harbors the usual compendium of wingnut fantasies:
Today, the group’s website frets about a looming “one world order” and says it seeks “to uncover the truth behind the private banking cartel of the military industrial complex” that wants to “eliminate national sovereignty.” Rudkowski now seems particularly worried about the alleged role in the supposedly imminent “New World Order” of organizations such as the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. These institutions have been targeted for decades as major global evildoers by Patriot groups and other far-right organizations, including several that are racist and virulently anti-Semitic.
Oy. It never ends completely. Vigilance is necessary.
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CA 26 and Linda Parks: Proof Anti-partisanship isn’t progressive
by David Atkins
The passage in 2010 of a non-partisan redistricting law and a top-two primary system eliminating partisan primaries has led to some interesting developments in California’s Ventura County. Longtime Republican incumbent Elton Gallegly retired after being redistricted out of his comfortably Republican seat. The new CA26 is very competitive, which has led to a myriad of candidates coming out of the woodwork to contest it, including Democratic 1st District Supervisor Steve Bennett and the hyper-conservative anti-tax crusader and State Senator Tony Strickland. This seat has quickly vaulted to national prominence as one of most competitive in the country.
But there’s another candidate in the race as well, who is already becoming the darling of Broderist centrists everywhere. Her name is Linda Parks, a moderate Republican County Supervisor who has survived well-funded challenges against her supported by the local Republican party, including against Tony Strickland’s own wife Audra.
Because of the new top-two non-partisan primary system, she gets to run without taking a party label–something she intends to do:
Supervisor Linda Parks of Thousand Oaks, vowing that she will be someone “who is not beholden to parties or special interests,” on Monday announced she will be a candidate in Ventura County’s new 26th Congressional District.
Parks is a Republican, but she made it clear that she does not intend to run as a partisan. She said in a statement that she intends to declare “independence from the party politics that are failing our nation.”
Under the rules of the state’s new top-two primary system, Parks has the option of declaring that independence on the ballot. The rules allow candidates to proclaim a preference for any qualified political party or to have their names listed on the ballot as having “no party preference…”
Parks has long been a political maverick unaligned with partisan interests in county political circles. During her 2010 re-election campaign for the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, in which she defeated former Assemblywoman Audra Strickland of Moorpark, she was opposed by the county Republican Central Committee, the hierarchy of her own party.
Parks is in the middle of her four-year term as supervisor, and thus can run for Congress this year without giving up her seat on the board.
She said she intends to highlight her independence in the congressional campaign, vowing not to accept campaign contributions from labor unions, political action committees or political parties. She will rely instead on individual contributions…
“Steve is backed by the Democratic Party and Tony by the Republican Party,” she wrote. “The partisan slugfest hopefully will remind voters how wedge politics and hyper-partisanship has led to polarization, brinkmanship politics and the lowest ratings for Congress.”
Mavericky shades of John McCain and Joe Lieberman, anyone?
The problem, of course, is that Linda Parks has to cast a vote for Speaker of the House. In an election year where control of Congress could well hinge on single vote, her vote might be the deciding one. She would almost certainly vote for Boehner or Cantor for speaker. Even in the unlikely event that she were to abstain, her vote wouldn’t go to Pelosi, thus potentially gifting control of the House to the Tea Party crowd. Moreover, she would either end up toeing the Republican Party line in Congress, or she would be shut out of every important Committee and position of authority. She would also be denied funding for the district by the GOP Congressional hierarchy, which would make her an utterly ineffective representative to keep jobs in the county.
In terms of governance, she would be somewhere between a Blue Dog Dem and an Eisenhower Republican–the same thing these days, really (in fact, the Blue Dogs are almost certainly to the Right of the old Eisenhower Republicans.) She would be a reliable vote for economic policies that favor the 1%, but would temper that with safety net preservation, moderate environmental policies to maintain the status quo (a carbon tax would almost certainly be out of bounds), and moderately liberal social policy.
While that’s better than a raging right-winger, she’s also the sort of politician who won’t do any heavy lifting to get the country out of this mess. She’d be as essentially useless on the GOP side as Joe Lieberman has been on the Dem side until his recent expulsion. Ironically, by seeming like such a breath of fresh air to the anti-partisans, she would be a legislator most likely to defend the status quo from incursions on the left or the right.
The interesting thing about the Tea Party Objectivists is that at the very least they understand, like progressives do, that the system is broken and needs change. Their version of change is horrifying, of course, but they have the same sense of times out of joint needing to be set right that progressives do. The increasingly partisan tug of war in this country is due to the fact that close observers can see the wheels coming off the wagon, and know that something has to be done about it. The very last thing the country needs is more politicians invested in the status quo, which is ironically what the anti-partisan Broderists would attempt to ensure.
Unsurprisingly, however, the media adoration has already begun, including from our local “progressive” weekly, the VC Reporter:
Just a few days after Gallegly’s announcement, Republican County Supervisor Linda Parks of Thousands Oaks stated her intention to run for the 26th District. The new district had already attracted a few known contenders, including progressive liberal County Supervisor Steve Bennett; conservative state Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks, is expected to announce his run for the seat soon. But what makes Parks’ election campaign unique in comparison to, really, any other we have seen in the county, is that for a partisan seat, she has decided to declare “no party preference.”
Too many of us have relied on partisan politics to ensure that our ways of doing things remain steadfast on Capitol Hill and in Sacramento. As long as they were blue, red or green or whatever the preference, that’s where our votes would go. It didn’t matter exactly who the people were that represented us as long as their parties were clear. Over the years, though, more voters in general have begun to shift gears, some claiming that they have become fiscally conservative, yet socially minded, eco-friendly, etc. We were voting for whatever party best suited our moral compass because that evolution hadn’t been translated into politics. In June 2010, though, California voters did away with the two-party primary and replaced it with the two top vote-getters. Enter Parks. Taking advantage of the new law, it is pretty clear that Parks is geared up to fight the battle to best fill the position, not to be the best Republican.
It’s refreshing to see such a progressive stance in politics. While we are still wary that campaigning could get dirty, that it could turn into mudslinging instead of being about pride in accomplishments and future goals, we stand by Parks in her decision to put down the partisan mascot. We hope to see similar strides as the political atmosphere shifts into a truer representation of what and who Ventura County is.
Of course, Parks’ run is neither a progressive nor positive development, nor is it truly in keeping with the values of Ventura County, which used to be solidly Republican, but has become much more Democratic in recent years and now has a voting majority of registered Democrats. Linda Parks would be a politician out of step with the views of the majority of Ventura County residents, who would be much better served by the likes of Steve Bennett instead.
But this is what happens when problems caused by pro-plutocratic policies get blamed on partisan infighting, and when supposed progressives get suckered into the rhetoric of anti-partisanship.
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Virtually Speaking Sunday
by digby
Digby and CultureOfTruth discuss the developments of the week.
Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio
The abortion bowl
by digby
For those who are complaining that Colbert’s The Definitely Not Coordinated With Stephen Colbert Super PAC’s new ad against Mitt trivializes our elections, well I’m afraid that ship sailed when the Supremes ruled in favor of Citizens United. If you think Stephen Colbert is offensive, get a load of this:
Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry has been running graphic ads of aborted fetuses in key primary states, as my colleague Tim Murphy has reported. Now the gruesome ads are coming to the Super Bowl.
Nothing says “pass the dip” like a bloody fetus. Normally, Terry wouldn’t be able to get these kinds of ads on television. So he’s launching a non-serious campaign for president (running as a Democratic challenger to President Obama) in order to exploit a loophole in Federal Communications Commission rules that requires station to run campaign ads in the weeks ahead of a primary election—no matter how grisly they might be. In the 45 days ahead of a primary and 60 days ahead of a general election, candidates for federal office can run whatever they want on local stations, as long as they pay for the airtime.
Yes, the FCC can try to fine you a half-million dollars for a “wardrobe malfunction,” but bundles of bloody body parts is A-okay.
Here’s what you’re going to be seeing:
The good news is that they can only run in states with primaries 45 days ahead of a primary, so anyone who isn’t living in a Super Tuesday state should be spared. For now.
I wrote earlier about this creative campaign by Terry. They are very serious about using these new rules to proselytize and lie and there’s not much anyone can do about it as long as it’s “election related.” Terry is recruiting candidates all over the country for the specific purpose of being able to run these ads.
You have to appreciate this worldview though. To zealots, nothing is more important than their own crusade and they just don’t think about anything else. It must be nice to live in such a black and white world where the trade-offs are so obvious and everything is so simple.
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Mitt the Ripper
by David Atkins
Stephen Colbert and his team are amazing:
There are many layers of brilliance in this ad: a commentary on our campaign finance system, on our over-the-top attack ads, on Mitt Romney’s duplicity, on Bain Capital, and on corporations themselves. It’s genius.
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In our brave new states’ rights dominant country,there will be many places where things like this will be common:
Three Indiana state senators, all Republicans, have introduced a bill that would allow schools to require the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer every morning, if they want to.
The Lord’s Prayer bill says the point is to help “each student recognize the importance of spiritual development in establishing character and becoming a good citizen,” but you can get out of reciting it if you or your parents want.
Well that’s good. Little first graders whose parents don’t want them to say it will have a fine time in school, I’m sure. But then that’s the price they have to pay for being heathens.
