Month: March 2012

Reacting to the Challenger

by digby

This interesting footage from the Challenger disaster has surfaced showing the reaction to the explosions among onlookers at the scene. I’m not sure what to think about this. I watched the thing live — I was getting ready for work and it happened to be on TV, and I knew what had happened the minute I saw it. People my age watched dozens of space launches and I assumed knew exactly what one was supposed to look like — and this certainly didn’t look like it. But these people don’t seem to understand that something’s gone wrong until it’s announced over the loudspeaker.

Maybe it’s a human response — you can’t believe what you are seeing before you because it’s so horrible, while seeing it on TV has enough distance that you can grok the reality more quickly. I think the same thing happened on 9/11 — I knew the minute I saw the footage of the plane hitting the first building that it was likely a terrorist attack, but again there was that distance that allowed me to accept such a terrible thing.

Anyway, this amateur video is fascinating. It’s amazing what awful things we witness in our lives and just go on. Of course, we don’t have a lot of choice, do we?

.

Disagreeing With Mark Bittman

by tristero

For the first time ever, I find myself disagreeing with the great Mark Bittman.

I get where he’s coming from, I understand that the quest for the perfect should not stand in the way of the good, but, imo, our food system needs radical changes, not band-aids. Fake “chicken” will relieve animal suffering – as a 30-year-plus vegetarian, that strikes me as a very good thing – but it comes at a price. As with all modern processed food, the specific balance of nutrients and micro-nutrients in “chicken” hasn’t been time-tested over centuries, as with traditional processes (e.g. cheeses). Replacing 40% of a culture’s animal protein with this stuff – or even just a significant fraction of that 40% – strikes me as a classic Bad Idea. Although the ingredients seem benign enough, the long term consequences could very well be dire, one more example of nutrionism running the show rather than the eating and enjoyment of delicious food.

Endorsing heavily processed industrial food also opens a slippery slope. I think Michael Pollan got it exactly right: Eat [non-industrial] food, not too much. Mostly plants. The sooner we all move in that direction, – by among other things, making real food affordable again, and by no longer hiding the high price of bad food through outrageous subsidies – the better. Sorry, but fake chicken doesn’t help.

A hallmark of liberalism – co-opted and cartooned by the right – is the willingness to question basic assumptions. To that end, I’m thrilled that Bittman, a man of enormous stature in the food world, is urging those of us who care about food politics to question carefully the practicality of “real food” and seek alternatives. I don’t think he makes a convincing case for “chicken,” but the issues are complex, there is a lot of needless animal suffering, and his voice is so important that I’m glad he raised the subject. It helps those of us who disagree articulate our problems with his position, and it may lead to other, more sensible ideas.

Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying

by David Atkins

I’m a big fan of the humor site Cracked.com; it’s a great source not only of humor but some really fascinating articles about nature, history and social science. Some of the articles could use a good deal of fact-checking so it’s not an authoritative source, but most of it is accurate and eye opening.

There’s also a lot of political opinion couched as humor, mostly from a progressive point of view. That’s partly because progressive viewpoints are fairly common among the Millennials who make up the site’s primary readership, and partly because good political humor has become almost the sole province of the left given the Right’s implosion into self-parody.

And sometimes, it can be very helpful. One of the problems with talking about income inequality to folks who aren’t politically obsessed is the tendency to become didactic and preachy, angrily showing off a lot of charts and graphs. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else, if not more so. It’s exactly the sort of stylistic approach that helped cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

Well, David Wong (pseudonym of Jason Pargin) has a great article to show the politically uninvolved why winger arguments about income inequality are wrong, in an easily accessible way. It’s called Six Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying. Some highlights:

Most high-income earners do put in a ton of hours. Bill Gates seemed to never sleep (an employee once said that putting in 81 hours in four days still couldn’t keep up with Gates’ schedule). So yes, it’s unfair that we tend to think that “being rich” means “lounging by the pool while an albino tiger massages our feet with his tongue.” So, “Hey, I work hard for what I have!” is perfectly true. It’s also insulting.

It’s insulting for the exact same reason “Hey, I love my country!” is insulting: It implies that the listener doesn’t. Otherwise there’d be no reason to say it.

It implies a bizarre alternate reality where society rewards you purely based on how much effort you exert, rather than according to how well your specific talents fit in with the needs of the marketplace in the particular era and part of the world in which you were born. It implies that the great investment banker makes 10 times more than a great nurse only because the banker works 10 times as hard.

He doesn’t.

And even stranger, it implies that money earned is a perfect indicator of a person’s value to society — if you’re broke, it must mean you’re a loser who contributes nothing to anyone’s life. And that’s downright bizarre when it comes from the same people who also go on and on about the importance of parenting and family values. Surely they’ve noticed that being a great stay-at-home parent makes you exactly zero dollars a year.

And volunteering to work at a shelter for battered women? Doesn’t pay shit! Diving into a creek to save a toddler from drowning? It pays infinitely less than throwing a touchdown pass during the Super Bowl.

Or this:

I guess our entire philosophy about money kind of revolves around this premise — that there is no poor or working class, but only people who have chosen to not buckle down to the task of getting rich (and thus deserve whatever salary, insecurity or poor work conditions they get). So there should be no talk about improving the lives of the non-rich, since any of them can simply choose to elevate themselves out of that group, right?

Seriously, now. How much time do you really have to spend off your goddamned yacht to see that this isn’t true? You don’t even need to leave the dock — there’s a guy standing right there who you pay to fix your boat’s engine. You know that 1) you absolutely need guys like him and 2) he will never get rich doing what he does. He could be great at his job, he might be the Michael Jordan of mechanics, he might work 100 hours a week — it doesn’t matter. Sure, if that one guy somehow also has the head for management and finance and the networking skills, he could maybe open his own chain of yacht repair shops. But they can’t all do that.

So “anyone can get rich” isn’t just untrue, it’s insultingly untrue. You can’t have a society where everyone is an investment banker. And you can’t have a society where you pay six figures to every good policeman, nurse, firefighter, schoolteacher, carpenter, electrician and all of the other ten thousand professions that civilization needs to survive (and that rich people need in order to stay rich).

It’s like setting a jar of moonshine on the floor of a boxcar full of 10 hobos and saying, “Now fight for it!” Sure, in the bloody aftermath you can say to each of the losers, “Hey, you could have had it if you’d fought harder!” and that’s true on an individual level. But not collectively — you knew goddamned well that nine hobos weren’t getting any hooch that night. So why are you acting like it’s their fault that only one of them is drunk?

And those are just a few short excerpts. There are a few places it could be a little better or make some stronger cases, but overall it’s one of the funniest, clearest and most accessible non-technical works out there on the arguments around income inequality. If you have non-political friends who have fallen for some of the one percent’s talking points, I highly recommend sharing it with them.

.

Saturday Night At The Movies

By Dennis Hartley

Let’s dispense with this right off the bat: Lula, the Son of Brazil is about as hagiographic as it gets. Then again, it’s not like co-directors Fabio Barreto and Marcelo Santiago are trying to pretend like their glowing biopic is intended to be interpreted as anything but (especially when you have a tagline like “The story of Brazil’s most beloved president!”). It’s also touted as the highest budgeted Brazilian film production to date, at 5 million dollars (isn’t that like, the catering bill for your typical bloated Hollywood epic these days?). Still, it is hard to find fault with a film about a person whom it is hard to find fault with. Yes, I know…no one is beyond reproach (as I’m sure I will be “schooled” by someone in the comments section, probably sharpening their knife already, as we speak).
Indeed, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s life journey from dirt-poor shoeshine boy to benevolent world leader (he served as president from 2003-2010) seems tailor-made for the silver screen, with all of the most influential players in his life plucked straight out of Central Casting (sometimes, all you have to do is tell the truth, and no one will believe you). I suspect that Fernando Bonassi, Denise Parana and Daniel Tendler’s screenplay (based on Parana’s book) practically wrote itself. You have the Strong Saintly Mother (Gloria Pires), the Drunken Abusive Father (Milhem Cortaz), and the Childhood Sweetheart (Clio Pires, pulling double duty as The Young 1st Wife Who Dies Tragically).
The film begins in Lula’s birth year, 1945. Lula, his mother Lindu and six siblings are left to fend for themselves after Aristides, his father, leaves (abandons?) the hard-scrabbling farm family to find work in the city. The family reunites when Lula (Felipe Falanga) is seven, after Aristides instructs Lindu to sell the house and land and move to the city (the meager proceeds from the assets are just enough to pay for their transportation). The boys are immediately put to work; an enterprising Lula shines shoes and sells flowers on the street. Lindu secretly enrolls him in school; when Aristides (an illiterate who values work over education) finds out, he is apoplectic. Lindu stands her ground, keeping Lula in school. His teacher, who senses an unusually high aptitude in the youngster and is empathetic to his poverty, makes an offer to his mother to adopt him. The proud Lindu refuses, opting to give all her children a chance at a better life by breaking free from the oppressive Aristides’ toxic orbit for good (you’ll feel like cheering). She gathers up the kids and moves to Sao Paulo, where they fare much better.
We watch Lula (played as an adult by Rui Ricardo Diaz) come of age; he graduates from a technical school, gets a factory job (where he loses a finger in a lathe mishap), and marries his childhood sweetheart. His first marriage ends tragically, after which he begins (at the encouragement of his brother and to the chagrin of his mother) to gravitate toward leftist politics. And we all know what that inevitably leads to…Lula becomes a (wait for it)…labor activist! By the time he becomes a union official in the late 70s, he finds himself at loggerheads with the military-controlled government of the time. After officials identify him as one of the prime movers behind a series of major work strikes, he is arrested and jailed. After prison, the increasingly politicized Lula helps create Brazil’s progressive Worker’s Party in the early 80s, and then…and then…the film ends.
Ay, there’s the rub, and the main reason why political junkies may find this slick, well-acted production inspiring on one hand, yet curiously unsatisfying on the other. The intriguing end crawl, highlighting milestones in Lula’s subsequent climb to the top suggests that the filmmakers may have picked the wrong half of his career to cover. I found myself wonting for “what happened next?!”, and asking questions like: What did he do to earn declaration as Brazil’s most beloved president, with an approval rating of 80.5% during the final months of his tenure? What inspired President Obama to greet him at the G20 summit with “That’s my man right there…love this guy…the most popular politician on Earth”? Don’t get me wrong, because I do loves me a stirring, old-fashioned leftist polemic as much as the next progressive pinko; I was righteously “stirred”, and had a lump in my throat many times…but something was lacking. By the time the credits rolled, I didn’t feel I had much insight as to what made Lula tick. What did make Lula run? Then again, perhaps I’m overlooking the obvious. The answer may lie in the three simple words that Lindu imparts to her beloved son, from her deathbed: “Never give up.”
Previous posts with related themes:
Top 10 Labor Day Films

Embarrassing Dennis

by digby

Glenn Greenwald says everything that needs to be said about the near universal reaction to the defeat of Dennis Kucinich. It’s dispiriting, to say the least, that such a stalwart liberal losing his office is celebrated with even more gusto than the defeat of your average Blue Dog, but there it is.

I realize that Kucinich was an odd duck and that he probably “asked for it” by supporting the gerrymander along with a hundred other bad political decisions. Nobody ever said he was a master strategist. What he was, was the guy who occupied the most leftward space in our political system along with just a small handful of others like Barbara Lee and Bernie Sanders — and that’s important. It’s not like they grow on trees.

Yes, he was by mainstream political standards “wacky” in his policy views, but then so am I. And it’s true that he said some embarrassing things at times, but so what? There really are worse things than being embarrassing — in fact, it’s often a brave and necessary thing to do. Frankly, I think we could use a few more people who are willing to be embarrassing on our side. This pusillanimous unwillingness to be uncool or unrespectable is a shortcoming not a strength. It limits our creativity and turns liberalism into a cramped and inflexible ideology, smaller and less interesting all the time.

Kucinich was an indomitable, true blue liberal who stood up and said what everyone else was too afraid to say. It would be just terrific if we had a lot more politicians who had the courage of his convictions and fewer of his personality quirks. But unfortunately we don’t, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be celebrating. One less embarrassment in the House?

I guess it all depends on who you find more embarrassing — flaky liberals or corrupt hypocrites. I happen to be mortified whenever I see the likes of Steny Hoyer speaking for the Democratic Party, but that’s just me. Dennis never made me feel ashamed the way those guys do.

.

Bloomberg’s Poorly Written Poll

by David Atkins

During my lunch break on work project today I received a phone call from the Bloomberg News Service. It was a standard poll asking my opinion on a range of issues including the economy, the President’s job performance, approval opinions for the Republican candidates, whom I would vote for in the Congressional and Presidential elections, and binary choices on my opinions of the hot-button issues of the day ranging from birth control to fracking.

As a research professional, I was taken aback at the simplistic nature of many of the questions, and at the gross omissions in the questionnaire. For instance, when asked about the most important issues of the day, the list did not include climate change or environmental issues of any sort, which would have been my answer. In this day and age when climate change is by far the most pressing issue facing mankind, that sort of oversight is inexcusable (I answered jobs and unemployment instead.)

But more interesting were the questions asking simply whether I approved or disapproved of 1) the President’s negotiations with the Republicans on the budget, and 2) the President’s handling of the deficit.

Of course, my first instinct was to answer a resounding no to both questions. But I hesitated and reconsidered. These were not open-ended questions, and there was no option for a third “other” response.

Now, any researcher worth their salt would tell you that this is terrible polling design. The questions should have been phrased and scaled something like this: “Considering the President’s negotiations on the budget, would you say that 1) the President has not done enough to compromise with Republicans on the budget; 2) the President has done enough to compromise with Republicans on the budget; or 3) the President has given up too much ground to compromise with Republicans on the budget?” A similar approach to the deficit question should have been taken.

Forcing respondents to choose a straight-up “yes” or “no” for approval/disapproval does not allow any indication even in a quantitative manner for why one might or might not disapprove.

I knew that any disapproval answers for the President’s approach to the deficit and negotiating with Republicans would be interpreted by lazy researchers and a lazy press to mean that I had felt that the President was too partisan in his approach, and not concerned enough with closing the deficit. So I swallowed hard and said that I approved.

So watch for the Bloomberg poll results to come out in a few days, and know that whatever results are reported will be skewed significantly to the right, through the peril of honest answers to poorly designed questions.

In the future, Bloomberg News might want to consider using a competent firm to design its polling questionnaire–unless, of course, it’s looking to drive a right-wing narrative. In which case, I suppose they should carry on as usual.

.

Yellow Peril

by digby

I think Erin Burnett may turn out to have been an even cannier hire than Eric Erickson and Dana Loesch:

It’s just so wrong on so many levels …

.

Sistah Sherrod

by digby

I guess we already knew the gist of this, but it’s still very dispiriting to see it proven out:

White House officials were in close contact with the Agriculture Department in the hours leading up to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s decision to fire USDA employee Shirley Sherrod in 2010, according to nearly 2,000 pages of internal emails released by the administration.

Emails obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act don’t contradict Vilsack’s assertion that he made the decision to oust Sherrod as the department’s director of rural development in Georgia after an edited video of her making supposed racist remarks surfaced on a conservative website.

But they do show the White House and Agriculture Department officials were sharing information and advice from the first minutes after the scandal began to emerge until Sherrod submitted a resignation hours later at the request of a senior USDA official.
[…]

USDA director of communications Chris Mather sent the White House press office a heads-up email describing the video.

“She goes on to make it a larger case about understanding race …. but looks bad. (Fox News host Bill) O’Reilly just called us for statement,” Mather says in the email.

White House spokesman Reid Cherlin, responds, asking Mather in an email what USDA is going to say about the matter, “and has she been fired? I’ll alert folks here.”

Mather answers, telling Cherlin that Sherrod had been placed on administrative leave. “I guess some folks over there are circling wagons,” Mather says, referring to the White House.

At the same time, Valerie Green of the White House presidential personnel office was emailing the USDA’s White House liaison, Kevin Washo, asking him to loop her in, “Please. Please. Please.”

Washo emails back to her, “I tried calling you.”

In a separate email exchange with Green, Washo asked for records the White House might have on Sherrod, who was a political appointee. Green says she is working on it. Washo replies: “Let me know what counsel says so we can be decisive on this.”

In a later email, Green says, “I still think we need the rest of the speech if we can get it.”

Despite those concerns, USDA officials extracted the resignation from Sherrod that evening. In an email, she offered her resignation but put the Obama administration “on notice that I will get the whole story out.” The next day, Sherrod appeared on numerous television news programs, saying she was unfairly asked to leave.

…Several emails detail White House and USDA calls to members of Congress, civil rights groups and Vilsack the night Sherrod was fired. No one stepped in to stop Vilsack from telling his subordinates to get Sherrod to resign. But it’s clear that the White House kept itself in the loop on the decision to oust her.

“We’re good with this version on this end. Counsel has cleared the language,” White House cabinet communications director Tom Gavin said in an email to the Agriculture Department’s Mather after Mather sent him Vilsack’s initial statement on Sherrod’s firing.

And yet, somehow, the following is also supposed to be true:

White House spokesman Jay Carney on Thursday repeated the administration’s statement that the decision to oust Sherrod was USDA’s alone.

“The emails confirm what we said at the time, which is that the White House had no involvement in the decision made regarding Ms. Sherrod’s employment, her firing, but were made aware of the decision that had been made by the Department of Agriculture,” Carney said.

It was a very tawdry moment and one that exposed once again the hair-trigger reaction on the part of Democrats to refute any idea that they are reverse racists, which has to be the most flat-out dumb political concern in the universe. As the ACORN disgrace also proved, they’ve turned Sistah Soljah into reflexive ritual.

.

Legacy of “what works”

by digby

Jeffrey Rosen thinks the president could redeem himself on civil liberties in the second term:

During the last presidential campaign, I swooningly predicted that Barack Obama would be our first civil libertarian president. Of course, I was wrong, and the last three years have offered plenty of disappointments in the president’s record on privacy and national security. But if Obama wins a second term, I hope reelection gives him the freedom to redeem that unfulfilled promise.

Isn’t it pretty to think so? I’ve made the point in the past that presidents do care about their legacy, so it’s not completely impossible to believe that President Obama could be pressured into taking more liberal positions in order to secure his place in history as a Great President on the terms that Democrats tend to want to be remembered. And who knows, maybe that’s even right.

But to believe what Jeffrey Rosen suggests, you would then have to believe that the administration’s hardcore national security and civil liberties policies have been nothing more than rank political pandering — and that would denote a very serious lack of integrity on a scale that automatically precludes presidential greatness. No, I have to give the president enough credit to think that he sincerely believes that the civil liberties and national security policies he’s followed and enacted are the right ones. They reflect the bipartisan political establishment agreement that America must remain a global military hegemon at all costs and that these encroachments on privacy and due process are a necessary part of that policy. And he hasn’t really been inconsistent. After all, he campaigned the first time as a pragmatist on these issues:

“[E]ven when you discuss war, the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that’s not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is “what works.” Even when I first opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was I don’t oppose all wars, specifically to make clear that this is not an anti-military, you know, 70’s love-in kind of approach.”

I think you have to take him at his word and accept that what he’s done in this realm in the past three years was done because he believes they are “what works.” The problem is that “what works” doesn’t always comport with our values and our beliefs. (And none of this is to say that any of it necessarily “works” either, simply that the government obviously believes it does.)

That’s one of the reasons we have a constitution and a set of ideals to guide us. Solely depending on “what works” naturally leads to authoritarianism (not that it can’t be achieved through other means as well.) Brute force can certainly be effective and nobody says that a police state isn’t efficient at capturing the bad guys. The problem is that it doesn’t care about the good guys it sweeps up in the process.

So yes, the President could change gears in his second term in a number of ways. Depending on the make-up of the congress, he could work hard to secure his health care reform’s provisions for poor people, which would go a long way toward making it a real legacy achievement. He could stand up to the right wing on the culture war in a consistent manner instead of using it as a convenient bargaining chip. He could defend labor, particularly public employees. He could become a reformer in the Teddy Roosevelt vein and demand banking and housing policy changes (although I suspect that falls in the same “pragmatic” realm as civil liberties, unfortunately.)

But after the policies of this first term, making respect for civil liberties and a lasting humane national security policy part of his legacy is going to be a very tough row to hoe because they reflect values of such transcendent importance. “What works” is very often the opposite of the values we supposedly hold dear — you either believe in them or you don’t. And for the last three years, it’s been the latter.

.

Pulling out

by digby

Slutgate seems to have been a crucible for American businesses:

Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 radio advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments… They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

John Avlon notes “the irony is that the same market forces that right-wing talk-radio hosts champion are helping to seal their fate. Advertisers are abandoning the shows because they no longer want to be associated with the hyperpartisan — and occasionally hateful — rhetoric. They are finally drawing a line because consumers are starting to take a stand.”

I don’t think they care about hyperpartisanship. They just don’t need the backlash that comes from creepy middle aged men behaving like barbarians and insulting half their customers. It’s not exactly an advertiser’s favorite image.

Of course the perennial question is what’s changed, since they’ve all been spewing hatred for ages. In my view, it’s mainly a combination of a weakly recovering economy and feminists, both men and women, who were able to mobilize via social media to stage an effective boycott. But there’s probably more to it than that. These things don’t just spring up out of nowhere. In this case, we had a series of events over the course of a few months that were staggeringly insulting to women so maybe it just reached critical mass. Or maybe it’s something else, some kind of a historical turning point that we can’t see since we’re in the middle of it. Or maybe not — it’s entirely possible that it’s another in the series of fits and starts that mark women’s progress in this world.

It remains to be seen if this will have any long term effect. But if it manages to break the two decade stranglehold of the right wing propagandists on radio, it will be a huge moment. These horrible people are a blight on the American political system and the path to a more civilized, decent society will be much clearer if their particular brand of rhetorically violent political “entertainment” is relegated to the past. The sentiments won’t go away, of course, but there’s no reason it has to dominate the airwaves of one whole media format.

Of course I’ve been thinking these creepy guys had to go out of fashion for the last ten years, so I won’t be celebrating until the lights actually go out. Still, it’s a hopeful sign.

.