Month: February 2014

We must worship them and give them offerings and praise

by digby

Matt Bruenig thinks there is a logical inconsistency in conservative pearl clutching that Obamacare is going to degrade the value of work. Citing this hysterical column by Ross Douthat he writes:

In the same New York Times edition that Douthat’s column appeared in, we are treated to a story of one rich man trying to rent an extremely expensive apartment. He retired very young because of a windfall profit he made speculating on Apple stock and thus no longer knows the inherent life-fulfilling dignity of work. A higher capital gains tax could have reduced his haul, ensuring that he continued to know the dignity of work, but any suggestion I make that conservatives support such a thing is decried as trolling.

That’s because it’s character building for poor and middle class people to work as much as possible. Keeps them out of trouble, dontcha know. They’re a little bit like children or fairly smart dogs that way. You’ve got to keep them occupied. The rich, on the other hand, are obviously superior in character — after all, they have money, which proves it. Not only should they be allowed to do whatever they choose with their time, the rest of us should worship them and give them offerings and praise.

As one of our Living Gods recently spaketh:

“The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the one percent, they should talk about emulating the one percent. The 1 percent work harder, the 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.”

See? This isn’t hard at all. The rich are better than the rest of us. That’s why they deserve to have good heath care and we don’t. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

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Republicans do not understand what it means to be human

by David Atkins

Republicans are very upset that people who are working just to hold onto health insurance might be willing to quit the labor force because the Affordable Care Act will allow them to. The notion that someone might devote their time to writing poetry instead of droning away at some awful job just to cover an insurance CEO’s yacht fee positively incenses them:

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Sunday said Democrats are pushing poetry as an alternative to holding a job.

During an appearance on Fox News, he referred to the results of a report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that finds millions of American workers may move away from full-time employment because of benefits offered within ObamaCare.

Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), say that the law allows workers to alleviate themselves from “job-lock” – staying in a job that’s otherwise unwanted or disliked, simply to collect healthcare benefits.

Media reports say Pelosi fired back at the Republican interpretation of the CBO report – that ObamaCare kills jobs – by saying the workers are now able to leave jobs to “[follow] their aspirations to be a writer; to be self-employed; to start a business.”

Gowdy honed in on the remarks, saying they are part of a larger effort to smooth over flaws with the healthcare reform law and its rollout during an election year.

“What the liberals and the Democrats want you to believe is, ‘Well, but you’ll have time to write poetry,’” Gowdy said. “Well, that’s great until you try and buy your grandkid a birthday present or you try and pay the heating bill.”

Obviously, of course, Mr. Gowdy is a low-information, low-intelligence Congressman. No one who can’t buy their grandkids birthday presents or pay their heating bill is going to be able to quit their job because of the Affordable Care Act. But if their healthcare costs are reduced dramatically, they might have the freedom to quit and take on early retirement, and maybe even spend real time with their grandkids instead of making an impulse buy at a big box store.

But concerning their contempt for poetry, the liberal arts and the human freedom to be something more than a cog in a corporate machine, perhaps Republicans might want to listen to a recent advertising campaign by Apple, America’s most profitable corporation:

That, of course, is a quote from the famous and extremely popular American film Dead Poet’s Society:

For the video-impaired, here it is:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman,

‘O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless–of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer. That you are here–that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

It is not inaccurate or extreme to declare that ideological Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. They view human beings as economic units to be plugged at their lowest possible price into a maximally efficient market that provides the greatest possible returns on investment to the wealthy few, with any resulting human resentment and misery dulled by humility before a pleasure-fearing angry God promising rewards to the obedient in the hereafter. It is a dark, meager, shriveled and cramped vision of humanity.

To accept their worldview is to reject the essence of human identity and purpose. If human beings could create a sustainable world of plenty free from violence, war, hunger or want, a world in which human beings were free to devote 24 hours a day to the leisurely pursuit of whatever activities they wished so long as they harmed no one else, conservatives would be terrified.

It’s not so much that conservatives don’t believe such a world of boundless human potential is possible. It’s that they don’t want it to be possible.

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The colour of your dreams

 By Dennis Hartley

Digby has invited me to share my memories and thoughts about the Beatles performing on the Ed Sullivan Show 50 years ago today (CBS is airing a 2 hour tribute special tonight-Paul and Ringo are doing a couple numbers!). Truth be told, that “memory” is a little fuzzy, for a couple of reasons. On February 9, 1964, I was all of 7 years old; a tad on the young side to fully grok the hormonal/cultural impact of this “screaming ‘yeah-yeah’ music” (as my dad would come to define any rock’n’roll he might overhear wafting from my room throughout my formative years). Also, I was living in Fairbanks, Alaska. At the time, none of the local TV stations were equipped to carry live network feeds. We would get Walter Cronkite a day late (the tapes had to be overnighted from Seattle via commercial jet flights). And weekly programs like Sullivan were, well, one week late. So technically I “remember” watching the Beatles perform 50 years ago, erm… next Sunday.

My true “discovery” of the Beatles occurred soon after I turned 11, during the summer of 1967, when my best pal George (who was 2 years my senior) practically browbeat me into blowing a month’s worth of allowance to pick up a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, assuring me that it would change my life. He was right. Sgt. Pepper turned out to be my gateway drug to all the music (from psychedelic and garage to metal and prog and punk and new wave and everything in between) that has become a crucial element of my life to this day.

I’ve done a few posts in the past about the Beatles on film (see the links below), and figured I had covered most angles. But the funny thing about Beatles-related movies and documentaries is that, like the band’s legacy itself, it’s a gift that seems to keep on giving. Just when you think you’ve learned everything there is to know, there’s Something New (hey…that would make a cool album title). A few weeks ago, I was perusing the bins of a music and video store here in Seattle, and stumbled upon a straight-to-DVD documentary from the UK with an intriguing (if unwieldy) title called Going Underground: McCartney, The Beatles And The UK Counter-culture . Focusing on a specific period of London’s underground scene, it connects the dots between the American Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac & co.), the social, sexual and aesthetic sea change in the UK during the early to mid-60s, and that its subsequent influence on the Beatles (one word: acid). As one interviewee observes, “They were probably the most avant-garde group in Britain, but also the most commercial.” Actually the Beatles don’t enter the narrative until about halfway through, but it’s still an absorbing watch. Recommended! I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Beatle songs/clips (and a perfect example of that avant-garde/commercial dichotomy).

BTW this is also the song I always play for those wizards who claim that Ringo was only a so-so drummer…listen to that mother go!

  

Previous posts with related themes:

I saw a film today, pt. 1: Confessions of a Beatle Fan

I saw a film today, pt. 2: Top 10 Fab 4 Flicks

I saw a film today, pt. 3: Magical Mystery Tour & Produced by George Martin

Good ‘ol Freda

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Obamacare, Gulag of the 21st century

by digby

Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning:

A hardened leftist tyrant who came to power in the 1920’s, spent a few years consolidating power into the hands of a very limited few, who also “fundamentally transformed” his nation had those people extradited to regions of Russia that were otherwise uninhabitable, or he had them executed.

People that didn’t conform to his ideas, realities, and “facts” were marginalized, isolated, and eventually dealt with.

Evidently that strict fear of shaking the good will or reality of Russia’s top leadership still exists.

But is America that far behind them?

We have a media complex that reports the administration’s view on almost all things without much variance. The handful of actual outlets that report actual facts that vary from the administration’s talking points are isolated and marginalized.

Through the fundamental transformation that has seen a complete dismantling of the private healthcare industry, while simultaneously eroding individual rights of religious practice, and the destruction of an economy encouraging private small business growth–the payroll of government jobs–beholding to the administration and its “great leader” have been the largest sector for jobs growth in six years.

While preaching tolerance to those who do not accept their views, the political, theological, and cultural left are the least tolerant people on the planet.

And while they demand that you yield your beliefs in order to carry favor with them. You must always accept what they believe as absolute truth.

Leaders on the left often struggle with a God complex, one need not doubt that Soviet era authoritarians practiced governance in such a way.

Putin is a former KGB agent and soviet era operative. A believer in centralized control, state-based control over the ways and means of life, not truly accountable to the people, and one that sees his role as vital to the advancement of a state-centric system to “solve” the “problems” his people face. Wildly so does President Obama and his operatives.

They neither feel responsible to tell their people the truth, nor do the people who are their subjects believe such leaders are capable of being told the truth.

This is certainly true about federally controlled healthcare programs that fail on every level. It’s true about protecting our ambassadors when under attack by terrorist operatives in the Middle East. And evidently it’s true about much smaller things.

Even about things as insignificant as an Olympic snowflake that doesn’t quite open.

Believe it or not, that rant was inspired by the fact that Matt Lauer didn’t properly quiz Putin about why the opening ceremonies Olympic ring cock-up wasn’t seen on Putin’s personal TV feed:

The obvious questions come to mind, “Why did they send the altered feed to Putin’s suite? Why did they fear Putin would see the actual truth? And what did they fear would happen if he did?”

The idea in the modern era, that members of a state run media group would live in fear for their life or livelihood because of something that could easily be a mechanical error harkens us back to Cold War era Soviet stories of people who merely “disappeared.”

Or as NBC’s Matt Lauer kept saying “were lost” in the “era of industrialization.”

No Matt Lauer, the Soviet Union didn’t “lose” people or “misplace” them or “forget where they were.”

A hardened leftist tyrant who came to power in the 1920’s, spent a few years … yadda,yadda,yadda.

Obamacare is just like the gulag. For realz. And hard core leftist “operatives” like Matt Lauer always stick to the Party line. The Communist Party, of course. As always.

From one leftist operative, to another, I give you:

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Dirty spy tricks

by digby

This is a very special story about a very special relationship:

British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”

Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and exclusively obtained by NBC News describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

Both PowerPoint presentations describe “Effects” campaigns that are broadly divided into two categories: cyber attacks and propaganda operations. The propaganda campaigns use deception, mass messaging and “pushing stories” via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. JTRIG also uses “false flag” operations, in which British agents carry out online actions that are designed to look like they were performed by one of Britain’s adversaries.

The good news is that we haven’t yet seen any evidence that the US is doing this. On the other hand, we’re very good at outsourcing our dirty work when we need to, aren’t we? (Just ask Mahar Arar.)

The real question here is just who decides who our “enemies” and “adversaries” are, isn’t it? Do we get a vote? Or is this yet another “need to know” bit of information?

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It started with the hair

by digby

It was 50 years ago today, the Beatles taught the world to say … yeah, yeah, yeah.  I was a little kid and I saw it on a tiny black and white TV my Dad bought just for the occasion. His famous remark was “and I thought Elvis was bad…”

What really bothered him was the hair. He found it to be some sort of disrespect to American manhood. And he wasn’t alone. The hair was what seemed to inflame a lot of people. All the remembrances this past week included comments like this:

And there was Ray Bloch, the musical director for “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He was so unimpressed by the Beatles that he told a reporter for The New York Times: “The only thing that’s different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year.”

Or this from the Washington Post:

“The Beatle cut is best done at home … with a rusty knife and fork.”

This ridiculous obsession with hair went on for years. Recall California Governor Ronald Reagan’s famous comment:

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”

The “walks like Jane” part is particularly telling, don’t you think? By the time they were making Broadway musicals about the topic, the freaks had become a part of the mainstream landscape and the traditionalists had started to grow sideburns and move on to other outrages about our changing culture. By 1976, our president had a modified Beatle do:

I think the modern panic about sex roles started with that allegedly “feminine”  Beatle haircut. And it only took 50 years to get to gay marriage on the road to full legalization. Let’s just say the straights (in all senses of the word) have been on the wrong side of all this for a very long time.

At one point they worked themselves into a complete frenzy:

Sweet young girl: The deacons in our church said they ought to ban the Beatles and firmly believe in everything that can be done to just about ruin the Beatles.  

Questioner: You want to ruin the Beatles? 

Sweet young girl: (smiling) Well, it really doesn’t matter. I think it might be funny, but I guess that’s sort of ugly of me …

No culture stages a witchhunt with quite the panache and pure joie de vivre of Americans. We really know how to do it right.

I liked the hair, myself, along with most people under the age of 25 at the time.

Oh, and the music was pretty good too.

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The junkies and the partisans

by digby

Jay Rosen has an excellent piece up explaining the tension between the insider Village scribes and actual humans who follow politics because … they are civic minded and care about government policies:

… [T]he cult of the savvy, my term for the ideology and political style that journalists like Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin spread through their work. The savvy severs any lingering solidarity between journalists as the providers of information, and voters as decision-makers in need of it. The savvy sets up — so it can speak to and cultivate — a third group between these two: close followers of the game. The most common term for them is “political junkies.” The site that Cillizza runs was created by that term. It’s called The Fix because that’s what political junkies need: their fix of inside-the-game news.

Junkies are not normal, but they accept their deformed status because it comes with compensations. They get to feel superior to ordinary voters, who are the objects of technique and of the savvy analyst’s smart read on what is likely to work in the next election. For while the junkies can hope to understand the game and how it operates, the voters are merely operated on. Not only does the savvy sever any solidarity between political journalists and the public they were once supposed to inform, it also draws a portion of the attentive public into emotional alliance with the ad makers, poll takers, claim fakers and buck rakers within the political class— the people who, as Max Weber put it in his famous essay “Politics as a Vocation,” live off politics.

But we’re not done. The savvy sets up a fifth group. (The first four: savvy journalists, political junkies, masters of the game, and an abstraction, The Voters.) These are the people who, as Weber put it, live for politics. They are involved as determined participants, not just occasional voters. Whereas the junkies can hope for admission to the secrets of the game (by taking cues from Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin and the guys at Politico) the activists are hopelessly deluded, always placing their own ideology before the cold hard facts.

If you follow the Twitter feeds of Ron Fournier of National Journal and Chuck Todd of NBC News you routinely see a category they call “partisans” described as silly, insane, overheated, unreasonable, absurd. Click here for Fournier doing it and here for Todd. Somewhere in their dinosaur brains those who “live off” politics understand that the people who live for it could steal their constituency and turn the savvy into the absurd creatures. Thus the constant ridicule of partisans. Thus the self-description on Ron Fournier’s Twitter bio. Political affiliation: Agnostic.

So this is what the savvy in the press do. Cultivate the political junkies. Dismiss and ridicule the activists, the “partisans.” Assess the tactics by which the masters of the game struggle to win. Turn the voters into an object, the behavior of which is subject to a kind of law that savvy journalists feel entitled to write.

I would just add my own little twist to Rosen’s thesis which is that the Villagers themselves — including the savvy political junkies — not only ridicule activists, they insist on the absurd construct that they more perfectly represent Real Americans. (Think millionaire TV host David Gregory talking about his mom being afraid to lose her job or Mrs Alan Greenspan Andrea Mitchell saying “we’re all going to have to sacrifice”.) It’s a neat trick to be both a savvy celebrity insider and “an average middle class American voter”, but they seem to have internalized that illogic and present it to the public without any sense of irony.

Anyway, it’s a great piece spurred on by the ongoing journalistic malpractice in reporting this week’s CBO report on Obamacare. Read the whole thing.

The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors
On his hobnail boots
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy
Working overtime

An immigration “compromise” 

by digby

Chuck Schumer this morning:

Well, it’s been a tough week for immigration. But all three, or many of the Republicans have said the following, Speaker Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, even Jim DeMint, they have said they want to do immigration reform, but they don’t trust the president to enforce the law, particularly the enforcement parts. So there’s a simple solution.

Let’s enact a law this year, but simply not let it actually start till 2017, after President Obama’s term is over. Now I think the rap against him, that he won’t enforce the law is false. He’s supported more people than any other president. But you can actually have the law start in 2017 without doing much violence to it.

You simply move the date back from December 31st, 2011 to December 31st 2013 as to when people, the deadline for people who could get even legalization or citizenship. So we could go after the new people who come in later. And it would solve the problem. And make no mistake about it, David. This view that we can get this done in 2015, ’16 is false.

You’ll have the Republican presidential primary to pull people over to the right, Tea Party maximizes. So it’s simple. Let’s say to our Republican colleagues, “You don’t trust Obama, enact the law, but put it into effect in 2017 and we can get–“

(OVERTALK)

DAVID GREGORY:

I’ve got to get a quick response from Senator Portman. I’m almost out of time. Senator, is Boehner at risk of losing his job if he pursues this?

SENATOR ROB PORTMAN:

No, no, I think John Boehner is fine in terms of his job. And I do think our immigration system is broken. When Chuck talks about delaying it, I think some Republicans would be interested in that, if we put in place the enforcement measure so that it would work. In other words, make sure the border is secure, make sure the anti-workforce enforcement program that works.

The concern we have, as you know, is to get back to the 1986 law. Last time we did this, where we did provide legalization but didn’t do the enforcement, three million people were legalized, another six million people came here illegally. So I think that’s what Republicans are looking for, is enforcement first.

I think we can see the outline here of a beautiful “compromise” don’t you? The one where everyone agrees to do (even more) “enforcement” first and then have the good stuff kick in later. The sticking point will be if the Republicans could gather enough of the their nativist neanderthals to agree to a set date (2017? 2025?) for reforms that actually help human beings. It’s a long shot.

Meanwhile, back in the states:

Even the most ardent “flash mob” haters have to admit that a band spontaneously playing “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles in a Spanish unemployment office can hardly be a bad thing. The flash mob was organized by the Spanish radio station Carne Cruda 2.0, marking the first time that “George Harrison” and “radio prank” have ever been mentioned in the same breath.

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The price of privilege

by digby

I think this piece by Paul Campos gets to the heart of the matter:

The real affluenza is the failure of the rich to appreciate that their special privileges – such as the privilege of operating under what is, from a practical perspective, a substantially different justice system than everyone else – must come at a price.

That price is paid in the form of the growing contempt of their fellow citizens, a contempt that grows in proportion to the ever-increasing gap in America between the children of privilege and everyone else.

They don’t just want to be rich and powerful. They want to be loved. But you know what they say about that:

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I’m sure they were absolutely positive they were right

by digby

I sure hope that none of you who are reading this are ever accused of something you didn’t do. It doesn’t always end this well:

The prosecution of Dale Shaffer was based solely on the identification of the suspect by three bank employees who variously testified that they saw the suspect from a distance away, “out of the corner of their eye,” or for only a second or two.

After his release from jail late Tuesday, Mr. Shaffer contacted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about his situation, which echoed that of DeAndre Brown, whose case was profiled in Sunday’s paper.

Mr. Brown was charged with robbing a Homewood bakery in September and spent a month in jail before anyone investigated his alibi — which proved he was at a work training seminar at the Carnegie Library in Oakland at the time the crime was committed.

In Mr. Shaffer’s case, he sat in jail for nearly a year awaiting the chance to prove his innocence.

“I wanted to clear my name,” he said.

Mr. Shaffer, 24, was accused of entering the branch at 2603 E. Carson Street on the South Side on March 13 and threatening a teller there.

According to an affidavit of probable cause, a person entered the bank about 2:45 p.m. and approached a teller, saying he would like to cash a check.

The subject then removed a folded note from his jacket, which said, “This is no joke. This is no 911. Give me all your money. No buttons or I’ll blow you away!”

The teller handed the suspect a little less than $850, and he fled.

A photo of the suspect was released to the media, and officers got a tip the next day from a person identifying the robber as Mr. Shaffer.

According to the criminal complaint, written by Pittsburgh police robbery Detective Nicholas Bobbs, Mr. Shaffer was picked out of a photo array and identified as the bank robber.

After his arrest on March 27, he said, Detective Bobbs attempted to get him to confess, but Mr. Shaffer would not.

“I know what I did or didn’t do,” he said. He told the detective, “You’re not going to scare me or entice me into confessing to something I didn’t do.”

Because Mr. Shaffer was already on probation from a previous conviction for driving under the influence, he was lodged in the Allegheny County Jail on a detainer — along with the robbery charges — and could not make bond.

He remained there until his trial began Monday, despite efforts by his defense attorney to get the case thrown out.

Assistant public defender Daniel Eichinger filed a number of motions filed in the case, targeting the identifications made by the bank employees.

He said they were unreliable and that the procedure used to obtain them by investigators was “highly suggestive.”

“Indeed, Mr. Shaffer is the only person in the photo array whose characteristics match the description provided by witnesses,” Mr. Eichinger wrote.

He couldn’t make bond because he was on probation for a DUI. So he sat in jail for a year.

You cannot help but wonder how often this sort of thing happens.

A spokesman for the DA’s office had no comment. Pittsburgh police supervisors could not be reached Friday. After the verdict was rendered, several jurors expressed to the defense that they believed that not only had the commonwealth failed to meet its burden, but that Mr. Shaffer was actually innocent.

But I’m sure those witnesses were very sure they had identified the right man. They usually are.

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