Sunday Funnies
by digby
"what digby sez..."
Month: October 2013
What took Democrats so long?
by David Atkins
Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled to see this. But what the hell took Democrats so long?
The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP. They honestly expected a few of the Democrats to crack—after all, four of them are running for re-election in states that voted for Mitt Romney. “If you’re a Mark Pryor,” said Ted Cruz last week, “if you’re a Mary Landrieu, running for re-election in Arkansas and Louisiana, and you start to get 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, calls from your constituents, suddenly, it changes the calculus entirely.”
Landrieu and Pryor never buckled. They voted with the rest of the party to amend or table every House bill. So did Alaska Sen. Mark Begich and North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan. So did West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate who’s not on the ballot again until 2018 but who’s on the record willing to delay the health insurance mandate. “This is about funding the government,” Manchin told me after one of his votes this week. “This isn’t about social issues.”
Why do they stick with Majority Leader Harry Reid—why, when three of them could cast “safe” no votes and Reid could still beat the House bills? Democratic aides say that the red-staters are “scared straight” by the House GOP. They’re not getting the calls from home to defund Obamacare. Their home-state papers aren’t dogging them, either. They’re in no fear of losing an “optics” battle to John Boehner and company.
Neither are the House Democrats. Neither are progressive organizations—not even labor unions like the Teamsters and AFL-CIO, which loudly demanded changes in the law, got cited by Republicans as proof that the Democratic coalition was imploding, then started showing up on the Hill for solidarity marches with furloughed workers. Sure, dozens of Democrats in competitive seats have now voted for “mini-CRs” that didn’t touch Obamacare. Fewer than 10 have voted for any CR that did. Gerrymandering and the 2010 election have hollowed out the old, media-savvy Blue Dogs who used to make public breaks from Rep. Nancy Pelosi. There’s a new, near-total refusal to compromise.
“It’s based on history,” said Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, a former chair of the House Progressive Caucus. “Every time that we get into these situations, whether it was the grand bargain or the last CR or the debt ceiling, at the end of the day it is all the give on the side of Democrats. I think that pattern is well-documented, and all of us know it. People vote for the greater good, to keep government working. Then you come back around, and there’s nothing left to give. I think we’ve reached the tipping point, with Democrats saying, ‘If you want to bear the responsibility for the crisis you’ve created, then you bear it, and we’re gonna stand firm.’”
Yeah, no kidding. Progressive bloggers have been saying this literally for years. Every time a progressive blogger said that Harry Reid and Barack Obama were giving away the store to the GOP and being played for suckers (or even secretly wanting conservative policies), all the usual suspects came out to say how important it was to be the only adult in the room, that bipartisanship was really important, how the President was actually playing 11th dimensional chess, etc.
This quote in particular floors me:
“Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things,” said Washington Rep. Jim McDermott after voting no on one of Thursday’s GOP bills. “You can’t deal with ’em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare—affordable health care—in large numbers. These guys have lost, and they can’t figure out how to admit it.” Why would House Democrats give away what the Supreme Court and the 2012 electorate didn’t? “You can’t say, OK, you get half of Obamacare—this isn’t a Solomonic decision,” McDermott said. “So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin’ lost.”
Yes, that’s great. But where was that realization when everyone was negotiating the sequester just a few months after the election? It’s not as if widely read progressive bloggers and even a few traditional columnists haven’t been pointing out this dynamic at length for the better part of a decade, and doing so with increasing alarm.
This is going to sound bitter, but it can’t be helped. Why is it that the people who realize political realities years too late still get to be the pundits and advisers, while the people who were right all along are still using blogs to shout from the outside looking in?
It seems that in D.C., there’s never a prize for being right. Only for being “serious.”
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Saturday Night at the Movies
Land of 1000 sessions
By Dennis Hartley
Things That Make You Feel Like An Old Hippie, #342: It’s quite possible that there’s a whole new generation of young musicians who have never heard the words “Tape’s rolling.” Oh, they may have dabbled in ACID…but any bedroom studio hipster will tell you it’s just a gateway drug to Pro Tools 9. At any rate, if you’re old enough to remember how to thread a TEAC A-3340S, you may find yourself getting a little misty-eyed watching an engaging new documentary from first-time director Greg “Freddy” Camalier.
His aptly entitled Muscle Shoals examines the origins and legacy of what has become known as the Muscle Shoals “sound”. It’s a sound borne of heart, soul, sweat…and close miking the bass drums. According to mystically-inclined interviewees, it’s about Native-American spirits, harmonic convergence, and location, location, location. Muscle Shoals, Alabama lies in the deep American South…as in banks of the Tennessee, goin’ down to the crossroads, cotton fields back home, South, y’all. Aretha Franklin describes it as a greasy kind of sound. At its heart, however, Camalier’s film is really a tale of two studios.
The story begins in the late 1950s, when songwriter/musician Rick Hall (who has the lion’s share of screen time amongst the talking heads) founded FAME Studios (an acronym for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) with two partners. Hall went solo on the venture a few years later, moving the studio down the road a piece to Muscle Shoals. Hall hit one out of the park on the very first session he did in the new digs, Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. In a bit of kismet, that song became one of the first hits for the Rolling Stones, when they covered it soon after. The yet-to-be-defined Muscle Shoals “sound” also caught the fancy of the Beatles, who covered “Anna” on their debut UK album Please Please Me (a song Alexander cut during those same sessions). Hall then used the profits to move his studio to its now iconic address on Avalon Avenue.
There was a secret to Hall’s subsequent success at attracting a gaggle of legendary clients, and it wasn’t solely due to his (obvious) prowess as a producer. That would be the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, aka “The Swampers” (as they were famously name-checked in the lyrics of Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”). The Swampers were to FAME Studios what the “Funk Brothers” were to Motown; a crack group of players who brought an indefinable kind of mojo to songs like Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally”, Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”. The Swampers formed a tight bond with Hall; which made for a very awkward moment in 1969 when they had to inform their soon to be ex-boss that Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler (who had originally brought Franklin and Pickett to work with Hall) was luring them away by building them their own local studio. As Hall recalls (with discernible bitterness), that meant “war” with Wexler and his friends-turned-rivals.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be a one-sided kind of war; the good kind…as in “A-side”. In their eagerness to one-up each other, Hall over at FAME and the traitors over at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio churned out a big ‘ol mess of classic sides, leaving music fans to reap and enjoy the spoils. Hall went on to produce choice cuts by the likes of Candi Staton, Etta James, Clarence Carter, Bobby Gentry, George Jackson, Lou Rawls and Wilson Pickett (in the film, Hall proudly cites Duane Allman’s fiery fretwork on Pickett’s “Hey Jude” as the genesis of “southern rock”). As FAME began to drift more into the country arena, Muscle Shoals Sound started to attract rockers like Traffic, Canned Heat, Lynyrd Skynrd, Rod Stewart, Bob Seger and The Rolling Stones (the latter can be seen in session there, in the Maysles Brothers 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter).
One particularly interesting aspect regarding this unique confluence of musical, songwriting and producing talent is the “colorblind” factor; especially when you consider when and where it all took place. The Swampers were the original “average white band”, but they could funk it up with a capital “F” (there are some amusing anecdotes in the film about some African-American artists’ initial shock when they found out that the soulful players who they had hitherto heard but not seen were so pale by comparison). While the civil rights movement was making significant headway throughout Muscle Shoals’ most prolific and influential period, they were stuck in a part of America where (there’s no polite way to put this) such news flashes weren’t getting through (Hall recalls the stark contrast of relaxed, unselfconscious camaraderie between black and white musicians in the studio with tense forays out to eat, where locals stared daggers at the “mixed” tables).
Mssrs Jagger and Richards are amongst the music luminaries on board to reminisce and/or offer insights (although I wish they had subtitled Keith’s typically unintelligible musings). Key members of The Swampers pitch in, as well as Jimmy Cliff, Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, Steve Winwood, Gregg Allman and, erm, Bono (did U2 ever record there?). I always get a kick out of vintage performance footage, and there’s a goodly amount of it on hand. I would have preferred a little more screen time devoted to the producer’s studio techniques, but that’s a personal problem. While the film gets a wee repetitive in the second half (how many ways can one describe the “magic” of a “special place”?) it’s an enjoyable (and refreshingly “analog”) ride for any music fan with a pulse.
(Muscle Shoals is in limited theatrical release, and now available on PPV and iTunes).
Wingnut Corn
by digby
And to think, all he had to do to keep it open would have been to allow 20 million people to continue to go without health insurance:
But wait. There’s a mistake there. John Aravosis helpfully fixed it for them:
QOTD: Grover
by digby
Look, these were the guys who thought sequestration was a great win for them and who made 85 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent. The Bush tax cuts were an upper hand he could have used to control the country for years. If he would have extended it for a year we’d be talking about whether there should be a tax increase right now. You shouldn’t spend too much time thinking you’re dealing with political geniuses here
He’s thinking like a Republican. Democrats think they will be rewarded for doing hard things that nobody likes because grown-ups. Republicans know better.
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The 2013 Government Shutdown Wedding of the Century
by digby
Getting married by Stephen Colbert is a dream come true. Plus Mandy Patinkin!
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Tea Party Starfish
by digby
Dave Weigel makes an important observation about Cruz’s alleged last minute Obamacare “end run” pointing out that it was signaled by the grassroots many months ago. He writes:
Absolutely, some House Republicans now go on the record blaming Cruz for their predicament. But that doesn’t mean they’re right, any more than the occasional angry moderate was right in 2011 when he said Grover Norquist (insert sound of cackle, bat wings) and his Taxpayer Protection Pledge was the reason Republicans found it impossible to agree to tax hikes.
Hey, it’s useful for moderates and the press to pretend these movements run top-down, or pretend they’re small. I have no clue why so many people have adopted the meme that “30 or so” Republican congressmen are holding the party hostage. Why do the party’s defund/delay bills keep getting 200+ votes? Here’s why: The conservative movement, the Tea Party especially, aspires to work like a “starfish” that survives even if a leg is cut off, instead of a “spider” that dies after losing a limb. This has never been a secret, but the press sure treats it like one.
Fact. These “moderates” (if you can call hard right conservatives who simply aren’t as batshit as Michele Bachman moderate) do have agency. They can blame Ted Cruz all they want, but he’s a feature not a bug.
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Dispatch from Gilead, October 2013
by digby
The judge asked her, “… do you know that when you have the abortion, it’s going to kill the child inside you?”
In a split decision released Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected a 16-year-old ward of the state’s request to waive parental consent to get an abortion, saying the girl had not shown she is sufficiently mature and well-informed enough to decide on her own whether to have an abortion.
The girl, who is not named in the opinion, was living with foster parents this year when a juvenile court terminated the parental rights of her biological parents, who had physically abused and neglected her. In a closed hearing this summer, she told Douglas County District Judge Peter Bataillon she was 10 weeks pregnant and asked for a court order allowing an abortion. She said she would not be able to financially support a child and feared she might lose her foster placement if her foster parents, whom she described as having strong religious beliefs, learned of her pregnancy.
She is competent to raise a child, however. Maybe she can become a prostitute to support the child. On the other hand, she is just a birthing vessel of no real importance so she can always just gestate the child for 9 months, go through forced chilbirth and them turn it over to someone else. She’ll get over it.
Just the image of a group of old white men (and one woman) in black robes, sitting up on a dais, making such a personal, intimate decision like this from on high chills my blood. It’s medieval:
By the way, a majority of the Nebraska Supreme Court are Democrats. And according to the article, it appears that the lone Democratic woman on the court sided with the majority in this case.
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Your Daily Grayson
by digby
On Bill Maher last night:
“I think there’s three Republican parties. There’s the corporate shills, there’s the religious fanatics and then there are the ‘freedom’ fiends, the one that want to make sure that you have the right to sleep under a bridge.”
“So, Jesus freaks, generic obese suburbanites, and let me add the super-rich,” added Maher. “That’s the Republican Party, isn’t it?”
The Swiss take a referendum on guaranteed yearly income
by David Atkins
Switzerland will hold a vote on whether to introduce a basic income for all adults, in a further sign of growing public activism over pay inequality since the financial crisis.
A grassroots committee is calling for all adults in Switzerland to receive an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,800) per month from the state, with the aim of providing a financial safety net for the population.
Organizers submitted more than the 100,000 signatures needed to call a referendum on Friday and tipped a truckload of 8 million five-rappen coins outside the parliament building in Berne, one for each person living in Switzerland.
Under Swiss law, citizens can organize popular initiatives that allow the channeling of public anger into direct political action. The country usually holds several referenda a year.
In March, Swiss voters backed some of the world’s strictest controls on executive pay, forcing public companies to give shareholders a binding vote on compensation.
A separate proposal to limit monthly executive pay to no more than what the company’s lowest-paid staff earn in a year, the so-called 1:12 initiative, faces a popular vote on November 24.
The idea of guaranteed income has been gaining popularity elsewhere in the world, as well. Jacob Hacker received a warm reception in the UK with his proposal for “predistribution”, and just last week the President of Cyprus announced a basic minimum income program also.
It’s on the far edge of public policy right now, but it won’t be for long. Globalization and mechanization of labor are creating a world for which the traditional answers of the last century or so on both the right and the left will be inadequate. In a world where just a few people can exponentially increase productivity, profits and personal wealth while firing workers and cutting wages, traditional Keynesian stimulus and taxation schemes are increasingly moot. Executive-to-worker pay ratios and minimum incomes will eventually be necessary.
Once these are more widely adopted, the biggest issue will be that of free rider countries that refuse to institute them in order to lure capital investment away from countries that take care of their people. Much like the EU is attempting to do with Ireland and other free rider countries in Europe today, it will take global action to bring scabbing featherbedder nations in line.
But this will eventually happen absent civilization collapse. It’s the only option that makes any sense.
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